A Minor-Planet Follow-Up Page

A PDF document describing the use of the MPES is available.

Astrometric observations of any of the following objects should be sent directly to mpc@cfa.harvard.edu. Updated orbits will be available automatically through this page.

Display ephemerides or summary

The following objects are available:

Options:

By default, ephemerides are geocentric, begin now and are for 20 days at 1 day intervals.

Start date for ephemerides: Number of dates to output

Ephemeris interval: Ephemeris units: days hours minutes seconds

For daily ephemerides, enter desired offset from 0h UT: hours

Observatory code:

Display positions in: truncated sexagesimal or full sexagesimal or decimal units

Display motions as: "/sec "/min "/hr °/day

Total motion and direction Separate R.A. and Decl. sky motions Separate R.A. and Decl. coordinate motions

Suppress output if sun above local horizon

Suppress output if object below local horizon

Generate perturbed ephemerides for unperturbed orbits

Also display elements for epoch

Format for elements output:

none MPC 1-line MPC 8-line
SkyMap (SkyMap Software) Guide (Project Pluto) xephem (E. Downey)
Home Planet (J. Walker) MyStars! (Relative Data Products) TheSky (Software Bisque)
Starry Night (Sienna Software) Deep Space (D. S. Chandler) PC-TCS (D. Harvey)
Earth Centered Universe (Nova Astronomics) Dance of the Planets (ARC) MegaStar V4.x (E.L.B. Software)
SkyChart 2000.0 (Southern Stars Software) Voyager II (Carina Software) SkyTools (CapellaSoft)
Autostar (Meade Instruments)

If you select 8-line MPC format, you may display the residual block for the objects selected:

Show residuals blocks. Show only residual lines containing observations from code . If you select 8-line MPC format the elements will be displayed with the ephemerides. If you select any format other than 8-line MPC format, only the elements are returned. In such cases your browser should download the elements file and save it to your local disk.

Supplementary Information

Summary
The summary lists the current J2000.0 coordinates, visual magnitude and solar elongation of the selected minor planets, as well as information on the date of last observation (where available), forthcoming opposition data and details on the latest published orbit. The opposition data lists the date of the next opposition and the declination and visual magnitude at that time.

Formats
The list of available formats for the orbital elements was correct at the time this document was prepared. It is possible that the Minor Planet Center now supports futher formats. If you select the summary option, any newly supported formats will be listed.

Elements
The elements supplied are the latest published elements for the specified objects. Elements will be found even if the designation you enter is a non-principal designation in an identification or if the object has been numbered.

Ephemerides can be supplied for objects with only Väisälä elements, but the elements themselves are not supplied.

Ephemerides
The ephemerides supplied for minor planets and comets are perturbed (if the orbits were computed with perturbations) and can be generated over the time period 1900 to 2040. Objects with unperturbed orbit solutions will return unperturbed ephemerides. Objects must be identified in images by their motion, not by their apparent closeness to a predicted position.

The time-scale of the supplied ephemerides is UTC.

If you desire a topocentric ephemeris, enter your observatory code in the appropriate box. When local circumstances are displayed, the azimuths are reckoned westwards from the south meridian.

As an aide-mémoire, the packed form of the object's designation (as used on the astrometric observation record) is displayed immediately above the ephemeris.

This service utilises the Minor Planet Ephemeris Service, courtesy of the IAU's Minor Planet Center. It has been made possible by Process Software Corporation, and their excellent VMS Web server, Purveyor.

The calculations will be performed on the Tamkin Foundation Computing Network.