Velocity direction

This paper could help us with our velocity vector direction issue.

http://www.adass.org/adass/proceedings/adass94/aket.html

Planet Positions from JPL

We found a good paper by E. M. Standish at JPL on Keplerian Elements for Approximate Positions of the Major Planets. This should be useful for initializing our program. However, we still don't know how to calculate the initial velocity vector if a planet is not at aphelion or perihelion. (Does this need to be found computationally?)

Adding ELON and ELAT to the code...

Matt and I tried adding the ELON and ELAT values from NASA to the Python code.

Crider3.py

Screen of MaximDL setup for astrometry

Plotting the Planets

Here is a NASA site for predicting the positions of planets on a given date.

http://cohoweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/helios/planet.html


The accuracy is pretty low. We should try to find something more accurate, I think.

New NEO Coming By Soon

We should try to get an image of this!

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/01/208251&from=rss