Asteroid YU55 - captured it at last

[iamjulian]

Fantastic. You are quickly becoming Mr Asteroid

[morimarty]

Very good work indeed, i'll second what iamjulian says very well done.

ATB martyn.

[Hypernova]

Good capture

Now can you please tell me how to get asteroids such as this to appear in CDC? I get no result on the advanced search and cannot seem to find the option for adding extra objects to the database

[lukebl]

Cheers, guys.

....Now can you please tell me how to get asteroids such as this to appear in CDC? I get no result on the advanced search and cannot seem to find the option for adding extra objects to the database

It's a bit fiddly at first, but you don't need to do it very often.

Firstly, go to

Setup > Internet > Orbital elements

You then get some options depending on which orbital database you wish to download, depending on how many asteroids you want to display. As a 'completist' I always download the full set, so I click on the 'MPCORB>70MB' button.

Then go to Setup > Solar System > Asteroid > Load MPC format file

Click on the 'Download' button, and it will promt you to confirm the download site. Wait while it downloads. If you go for the MPCORB.DAT file, like I do, it will take some time as it's a big file. CdC will then spend some time processing the data, which again will take a bit of time (a few minutes) if you've downloaded the big file (570,647 asteroids on the latest download!).

It then tells you 'before you can use the new orbital elements, you must compute the monthly data'. Click OK, and it will go to the 'Prepare monthly data' window. Click 'compute' and wait. Finally, it will tell you 'you are now ready to display the asteroid for this time period'. Click the 'Show asteroids' button on the toolbar.

To limit the number of asteroids on display (i.e. only displaying the brightest ones), go to Setup > Solar System > Asteroid > General Settings, and it will give you options for the magnitude limit. Note that if you attempt to display all the asteroids, the program will overload (well, mine does!). Also, the magnitude of the fainter asteroids often appears to be incorrect. It said, for instance, that YU55 was at magnitude 7.5.

Good luck!