You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
Minor bodies: comets and numbered asteroids at acquisition time
MPC element sets (CometEls.txt + MPCORB) propagate with two-body
mechanics — elliptic and hyperbolic Kepler plus Barker's parabolic
case — against the JPL approximate Earth ephemeris, with a light-time
iteration. These objects move arcminutes to degrees per day, so
`solve --minor-bodies elements.bin --time <ISO>` (or the FITS DATE-OBS
header) evaluates positions at the exact acquisition time and lists
what is in the footprint with estimated magnitudes.
Validation: (1) Ceres lands 16 arcsec from the JPL Horizons geocentric
position; C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) propagated to a real image's capture night
lands 0.25 deg from the solved frame center — the comet labels itself.
New: download-data mpc, build-data minor-bodies (asteroid H cutoff,
default 16), the SEIZAMB1 element format, and a Windows x86_64 zip in
the release workflow.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>