[Kstars-devel] New comets file for Kstars -- needs checking but 17P/Holmes looks good

[Jason Harris]

Hi David,

Thanks a lot for your contribution.  I'm sorry your message took 4 days 
to get posted, but we actually have an updated comets.dat file now, 
which you can get with the Get New Stuff tool (Ctrl+D).

Your comets.dat file looks good, but in case you submit another update 
in the future, note that I've updated the README.ephemerides file with 
more comets that need to be removed from the list.  Any comet with a 
"D/" prefix has "disappeared", so should not be in the list.  Also, 
there are a number of comets with large, negative MJD dates and 
eccentricities of 1.0 (or > 0.99).  These are historical comets that 
were on one-pass parabolic orbits through the inner slar system, and are 
never coming back.  These should also be removed from the list.

Thanks, and again, I apologize that I didn't see your message until today.

Jason


David Craig wrote:
> Greetings:
> 
> I think I have properly edited a new comets.dat file for kstars, using the
> instructions at:
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdeedu/kstars/README.ephemerides?revision=623819&view=markup
> 
> I noticed that in the most recent kstars comet didn't put 17P/Holmes in the
> right place (now in outburst!), so I got the JPL comets file that was
> updated on 2007-Oct-27 02:10 -0700.
> 
> I found that kstars would hang on reading this file after the header lines
> were removed, and the new version from JPL was 3 spaces wider in the first
> column,
> so I used a regular expression in Geany to remove the 3 spaces.
> 
> I hope this is useful.  Someone more experienced than me in kstars should
> check the locations of some more comets to see if it is really OK.
> 
> Thanks,
> -dwc
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Kstars-devel mailing list
> Kstars-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kstars-devel