Some weeks ago, Lawrence Harris asked how to find asteroids with names such as "2000 EB173". Indeed, Guide doesn't recognize such reference as a valid asteroid identification. Although, that feature can be useful not only for a localization map but also to get informations about the asteroid.

This question led me to look further the display of asteroids, because there are still problems, even with the 8 aug. 2000 version, despite the fix Bill says he has made, as he wrote in his message of june 26th :

> Lawrence is correct: the 'go to' function should work, regardless
> of magnitude level. (Though you _do_ need to have MPCORB turned 'on'
> to find MPCORB objects.)
>
> However, I think I've got the problem. John Greaves reminded me,
> via private e-mail, that there was a problem when MPCORB grew past
> 64K asteroids, and I posted a fix for it. This is in message 647:
>
> http://www.egroups.com/group/guide-user/647.html
>
> Basically, if you download the current software, this problem should
> go away. (Until you do so, Guide will show only N-64K of the N asteroids
> in that file.)

1. MPCORB or not ?
---------------------
It appears that when I deactivate MPCORB, I see many much more asteroids displayed, with names like 1996 QP1, 2272 T-2, 4642 P-L, 1998 FY118, and so on.

I expected the contrary, because I thought MPCORB is more up to date concerning newly discovered asteroids.


2. The Go to function
--------------------
The "Go To" function works well (without MPCORB) with "1996 QP1", "2272 T-2", "4642 P-L", "1998 FG76", but not with "1998 FY118" (Guide syas "Not an asteroid").

And when I ask to go to "1998 FY11", Guide goes to 1998 FY116. And for "1998 FY12", it goes to 1998 FY122... Only the first nine characters are good.
But it works well with "1998 FY1" (except if MPCORB is activated : then the designation is "Not an asteroid" :-(

Perhaps there is a problem with the lenght of the character string to hold the designation of the asteroid ?



Sincerely,

Laurent Zimmermann *<|:-)
http://users.skynet.be/zmn/cab/cab.html

----- Original Message -----
From: Lawrence Harris <lawrence_harris@...>
To: <guide-user@egroups.com>
Sent: jeudi 22 juin 2000 18:36
Subject: [guide-user] asteroid entries


> Can someone clarify the method required to tell Guide how to find some
> types of asteroid as in the following case:
>
> asteroid named 2000 EB173
> Guide does not recognise this, even using a recent MPCorb.dat file.
>
> regards
>
> Lawrence Harris