Quote:
Originally Posted by JethroB76
Would someone like to run through the procedure required to load a comet orbital element into the AN - particularly the format of the data required - is there a source of this info that doesn't require manipulation prior to loading?
I assume somewhere on this website is the info...
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Comets/ |
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the post.
The IAU Minor Planet Center (MPC) is the definitive organization for defining
and publishing comet orbital elements. They publish the orbital elements in formats
for a variety of third party planetarium programs and Argo Navis uses the same
format as the program TheSky by Software Bisque.
You can download comet and asteroid orbital elements from here -
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Soft06.html
Argo Navis can accommodate up to fifty asteroid orbital elements
and up to 10 comet orbital elements at a time.
Most of the downloadable lists from the MPC contain dozens of objects.
You should download the lists to an appropriate place on your PC, such
as the Downloads folder if you have one or the Desktop and then use
a plain text editor such as Notepad to edit them down to only the entries
you are after. Each comet takes one line in the file, so editing them
by either copying and pasting the appropriate lines to a new file or
by deleting lines from the original file you should find pretty straight forward.
Then pp 152-165 of the Argo Navis User's Manual shows you how to install
the Argonaut utility on your PC and how to download the files to your Argo Navis.
Argonaut comes on your Argo Navis CDROM or you can download it from the
the Wildcard Innovations web site.
The Manual pages also include screen shots so you should be able to
follow step by step. If you need assistance, please don't hesitate to email us
at
sales@wildcard-innovations.com.au or give us a phone call.
Enjoy and good hunting!
Best Regards
Gary Kopff
Managing Director
Wildcard Innovations Pty. Ltd.
20 Kilmory Place
Mount Kuring-Gai NSW 2080
Australia
Phone +61-2-9457-9049
Fax +61-2-9457-9593
sales@wildcard-innovations.com.au
http://www.wildcard-innovations.com.au