Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Saving orbital elements in astorb.dat format? #45

Open
void4 opened this issue Jul 16, 2023 · 1 comment
Open

Saving orbital elements in astorb.dat format? #45

void4 opened this issue Jul 16, 2023 · 1 comment

Comments

@void4
Copy link

void4 commented Jul 16, 2023

It would be great if find_orb could export orbital elements in the astorb.dat format, which differs from the MPC Export Format for Minor-Planet Orbits (i created a separate issue for that here: #44).

My specific use case here would be the ability to track objects directly from observations using the Planewave PWI4 software:
image

@Bill-Gray
Copy link
Owner

Bill-Gray commented Aug 17, 2023

Noted. I may be able to figure out a reasonable way to do it, but...

The entire issue of orbital element formats is a real hairball. Sometime yestercentury, Gareth Williams of the Minor Planet Center contacted me to inquire about what format my desktop planetarium software used; he then started generating orbital elements for various software packages. While I very much appreciated this at the time, it occurred to me later that we really need a "standard" format for exchanging orbital elements.

As described at that link, both MPCORB.dat and ASTORB.dat formats have serious limitations that make them useless for comets and problematic even for some asteroids. MPC has recently come up with a proposed "standard" orbit format. It's not quite all I'd like to see, but it's pretty good... certainly an improvement, at least.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants