Other ephemeris services

Bill J. Gray Aug 30, 2000

Andrea asked about extending support for NEOCP ephemerides to two
other services: the Minor Planet Ephemeris service and the NEODyS
service. If you download NEOCP.ZIP yet again, you should see that
the list of togglable datasets now includes "MPC Minor Planet
Ephemeris" and "NEODyS Ephemeris".

As before, you may have to edit NEOCP.TDF to change the file names.
At present, they use the default mpeph2.com and neoibo, respectively.
You'll also probably notice that I essentially recycled the definition
set up for the NEOCP ephemerides, adjusting slightly for the different
columns... and Andrea, be aware that I could only partially recycle the
Italian text, so you'll see some information in "Itallish" such as
"Apparent motion in asc. retta" <grin>.

Incidentally, there are two known oddities with the NEOCP ephemerides
that will also apply to these new services. Be sure to accept the
default coordinate settings. For NEOCP, this is hours/minutes and
degree/minutes; ask for, say, hours/minutes/seconds, and the format
changes, and the .TDF file doesn't figure it out correctly.

Second, you'll probably see a clot of symbols at the vernal equinox
(0h0m0s, +0 0' 0"). Guide occasionally is misinterpreting header lines
as real data lines. I'll probably fix this on the next update.

-- Bill