Hello all,

The problem affected retrograde comets. But retrograde
comets almost always have near-parabolic orbits, and it
would be easy to see a few comets with e>1 that also happened
to be retrograde, and to assume it was the e>1 causing trouble.

As has been noted, use of the current 'new.htm' version
fixes the problem.

Comets can, and often do, have eccentricities slightly greater
than one. But usually only slightly so. The only real exception
I can think of was Lexell's comet in 1770, which passed by Jupiter
and got completely ejected from the Solar System. I don't know what
its eccentricity was, but it must have been significantly greater
than one.

A while back, I took a look through a list of comet orbital
elements and saw that none had e>1.05. If my Find_Orb program
gets heliocentric elements with e>1.2 (or with perihelion distance
greater than 90 AU), it shows the orbital elements in red; the
idea is that the user should look at the elements to see what
went wrong.

-- Bill