Denis,

I am very intrested to see your program. Since I use older PC's with
Guide and other smaller programs that use MPCORB files, it will help
speed things up. Please post at your on your web site.

John D. Sabia

--- In guide-user@yahoogroups.com, Denis <boucherd@...> wrote:
>
> For those interested I have written a small program which takes the
> large MPCOrb file and reduces it to a small file of asteroids based
on
> user date and magnitude settings.
>
> Simply select a date and maximum magnitude, the program calculates
the
> asteroid position and determines its magnitude on the specified
date.
> Then it writes to a new file(MPCOrb.dat) only elements with
magnitude
> less than specified by the user. By doing this once a month, one
can
> keep the size down and asteroid up to date. The process takes 10 to
15
> seconds to complete on my 2 year old laptop.
>
> A 16 magnitude setting showed 1348 asteroids, file size 271k.
> A 18 mag setting gave me around 10,000 with a file size a little
more
> than 2 meg.
>
> Let this list know and if interest is high enough I will post a
link to
> my site to download it.
>
> Denis
>