alfredo caronia Aug 29, 2012
> **[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
> Hi James,
>
> Quick fix first: download this file to your Guide folder
>
> http://www.projectpluto.com/comets.dat
>
> (about 160 KBytes), overwriting the copy currently there.
> This will simultaneously give you up-to-date comet information,
> including some not available through MPC; _and_ it will clean
> out any NEOs or critical-list objects or other asteroids that
> are lurking in your current 'comets.dat', masquerading as comets.
>
> That's the fix. Now to describe why this bug is happening :
>
> This is an issue that has arisen because the MPC's list of
> NEOs and critical list objects have grown a _lot_. In the past,
> Guide did a passable job of downloading NEOs and critical-list
> objects, then merging them with the general asteroid data. I've
> modified the "add MPC comet/asteroid" dialog to include a disclaimer
> that you almost certainly _should not_ download NEOs and critical
> list objects. (The better solution is to use MPCORB.DAT; this
> replaces _all_ asteroids at once, so you don't get the weirdness
> that inevitably comes of trying to mix heterogeneous datasets.)
>
> The fix I hope to offer shortly is to skip merging entirely.
> Guide will instead have options to download NEOs and critical-list
> and distant objects, and then display asteroids using those lists...
> _and not showing the remaining asteroids_. That is, if you tell
> Guide to show the current MPC's list of NEOs, you'll get NEOs,
> not NEOs plus everything else.
>
> I really should have done this from the beginning. Among other
> benefits (such as working properly and not leading to bugs such as
> the one you ran into), it will cause Guide to run faster. There
> are far fewer NEOs than there are asteroids in general; if Guide
> is just showing NEOs (or critical-list or distant objects), the
> display time will improve by a lot.
>
> -- Bill
>
>
>