Hi folks,

Sorry for my long absence! I was sick for a while, and am
busily catching up on e-mails. In no particular order:

LUNAR ECLIPSE TABLE BUG:

This one has me baffled at present; the function works fine on my
machine. (Of course, _all_ functions _always_ work fine on the
programmer's computer!) If anyone notices a pattern, such as "it
works if I do thus-and-such, and fails if I do thus-and-such", or
other tables that fail, please let me know.

ECLIPSE CENTERLINE/MAXIMUM POINT:

James Ellis asked about display of these, and the answer is that
(at least right now) Guide shows neither of these items. Of course,
he's right in thinking these would be nice to have.
SPECIFYING LOCATION NAMES:

Roger Curry asked about some of the oddities in the 'enter location
name' function. For a full description, see

http://www.projectpluto.com/update7c.htm#enter_location

Specifying a country, or (within the US) a state code, is a Very
Good Idea, given that there are "London"s and "Moscow"s all over the
place. (The database on Guide 7 had no 'level of importance' data,
and didn't realize that when somebody says "Moscow", they probably mean
the one in Russia, not the ones in Idaho or Maine in the US. The Guide 8
database will be smarter.)

Better still is to give either a five-digit US postal code or a
three-digit MPC code. These are less ambiguous and the lat/lon you get
tends to be more exact.

MPCORB ELEMENTS:

Matt Dawson asked how badly accuracy would suffer if MPCORB elements
were allowed to "age" a month. The answer is: _usually_, not that
much. The only concern would be if, during that month, observations
were made that drastically improved the orbit. But the errors due to
perturbations will not really pile up (usually) until the elements are
a few months old.

-- Bill