Hi Denis,

I see what you mean...

There are a couple of problems here. At least at present, your best
bet is probably to download NEA.DAT, then modify MPCORB_PATH to point
to it. In other words, bypass the Extras... Asteroid/Comet functions
entirely. (Which is pretty much what you ended up doing, I gather.)

What I'll have to do is to revise the comet/asteroid element downloading
dialog to work as follows:

-- You can click on an option to update comet data. This will simply
gather files from IMCCE and MPC, which Guide will then display.

-- You can click on an option to have Guide download NEA.DAT, MPCORB.DAT,
and similar files. These will change MPCORB_PATH to point to the new file.
It'll basically do what you just did, except you won't need to know about
'guide.dat' or which files MPC uses or about MPCORB_PATH. You'll be able
to just tell Guide, "Show me NEAs", and Guide will do it.

-- A few people will probably prefer to download the files themselves.
Or they may download a file and then filter it to include only the objects
in which they are interested. For them, there will be an option to click
on that will bring up a file dialog; they can click on that file, thereby
telling Guide, "Please show me asteroids from this file."

Shouldn't be terribly difficult, I think. The hardest part will be in
coming up with a way of writing the above that everybody will understand
right away. More of a "how do I explain this?" problem than a "how will I
get this to work?" problem.

-- Bill

On 02/03/2013 06:44 PM, Denis wrote:
> Bill, further to my last email,
>
> When I select the file NEA.DAT in my folder "Asteroid MPC", it creates
> the line "MPC_PATH=C:\Asteroid MPC\NEA.DAT" in guide.dat.
>
> Instead of creating the line "MPCORB_PATH=C:\Asteroid MPC\NEA.DAT".
>
> When "MPC_PATH" is changed in guide.dat to "MPCORB_PATH", it works fine
> and only shows the NEA asteroids.
>
> Denis