Re: [guide-user] Juno positional error

Bill J Gray Nov 1, 2005

Hi Larry,

Hold the phone! Just realized I overlooked the fact that you saw an
error of six or seven arcMINUTES, not arcSECONDS!

Go to Extras... Edit Comet Data, select Juno, and then click on
Delete. You should see it drop from that multi-arcminute error to a
multi-arcsecond one (at worst).

The elements on the Guide CD are a couple of years old, but have
been integrated out to assorted epochs over the coming decades; they're
perfectly fine for numbered asteroids (at least, to the arcsecond
level). What you're seeing here is something different: it sounds as
if you imported MPC asteroids a while back, and now have the MPC data
for some now-distant epoch. Instead of ignoring a maximum of 100 days
of perturbations, Guide is now using a truly elderly set of elements
and perhaps ignoring years of perturbations.

Get rid of the MPC data in the manner described in the second
paragraph, and you should be reasonably well set. Not well enough to
get a dead-on asteroid occultation prediction, mind you, but much
better off than you would be at present.

-- Bill