Bill-Gray
Saving orbital elements in astorb.dat format?
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: https://github.com/Bill-Gray/find_orb/issues/44).
My specific use case here would be the ability to track objects directly from observations using the Planewave PWI4 software:
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.
