Hi folks,

I've just made an (essentially bug-fix) update to the
software on the Web site.

It seems MPC has made not one, but _two_ changes in the
way asteroid names are stored in MPCORB, resulting in three
different possible formats. The update handles them all.
It looks as if you'll need this update if you want to run
Guide with MPCORB.

You may also notice that asteroids drawn from MPCORB
are shown more briskly. Whether or not you notice this
depends on how you use Guide. As I mentioned, Guide has
long had to do a lot of math to compute where MPCORB
objects fall on a particular day; after that, it could
draw asteroids quickly within that particular day (more
quickly than with its "built-in" elements). But change
the date, and it had to redo all of that math, and you
saw an hourglass for a while.

I've revised Guide so that it can now work in 50-day
chunks. For many people, who are just interested in
where asteroids are now and where they'll be in the next
week or so, this should help a lot.

I have hopes of revising things further so that Guide
can keep track of a few 50-day chunks at a time, caching
them as needed. My goal is to make the "built-in"
elements to become completely obsolete.

-- Bill