Has anybody been able to plot the position of Asteroid 45 (Eugenia) in CdC? It's supposed to occult a star this Saturday for observers in the southern USA / northern Mexico.
Seems like it should be simple enough, but I get a result that can't be right. Way too far south, wrong time of day. Meade's skychart program however does it correctly, it seems. I went to "select catalogues and display conditions," clicked on asteroids, clicked on ASTORB, clicked on Asteroid Elements, clicked on Connect, it apparently got its data from the internet. Clicked on Refresh, there it is. Elements are allegedly Equinox 2000 e 0.0820015 Incl. 6.60921 Epoch 2006123 Peri. 85.32884 a 2.7206735 M. anomaly 132.94224 Node 147.93682 But. When I plot that for right now, I get Date RA: 20h41m54.34s DE:-15°19'03.1" and it's not even above the horizon in the evening, as it should be. It should be way higher than -15. Meade's Autostar Suite comes back with RA 04:54:52.218 Dec +16°59'34.72" Which is a lot more reasonable because it's very close to the star that will be occulted. Here's what the Meade program is using. Some items are identifiable and reasonably close to the above data. 000045 2000 2451857.4975379 2.4949257 273.1761420 2453101.5 85.4973830 147.9611550 6.6121170 0.083071390 2.720959570 7.46 0.1 0.66 C Eugenia (45) Did one of these two somehow get corrupted data, and the other didn't? Am I somehow downloading an ephemeris in a wrong format? Or is there a problem because these orbital elements date back to 2005 (no more recent ones on ASTORB yet for #45)? Hmmm... Just checking... Meade gives coordinates for Ceres (1) as RA 03:20:40.144 Dec +16 50 10.86 while CdC using ASTORB gives RA: 23h15m07.05s DE:-13°24'03.0" Most definitely not right. So it's not just the one that's incorrect. But, if I go to CdC and instead of Astorb, use CBAT, I get these coordinates for Ceres: J2000 RA: 3h21m15.28s DE:+16°55'28.0" Date RA: 3h21m43.00s DE:+16°57'12.6" Much better. OK, so apparently I can't use ASTORB. But why? Is there a known problem with the ASTORB database? Pete
