Stellarium

will you add asteroid 2011 for tuesdays flyby?

Asked by john s. thigpenn

will you add asteroid 2011 for tuesday's flyby?

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Bogdan Marinov
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Best Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab) said : 		#1

Do you mean asteroid 2005 YU55?

You can add it with the Solar System Editor plug-in (see the link - it's about comets, but the way to use the plug-in is similar), but due to the Earth's gravitational perturbation on the asteroid's orbit and several other reasons, the predicted positions will not be very accurate. (Stellarium is not a gravity simulator - it just plots stable orbits according to the given orbital elements.)

https://answers.launchpad.net/stellarium/+faq/1746

You can try using JPL's HORIZONS database to calculate orbital elements for the 8th of November and use this parser to convert the output to Stellarium's format:
http://projects.familie-steinel.de/stellarium-comet-jpl/
After that, you'll need to add it manually to Stellarium's ssystem.ini file. Make sure you edit the right copy - the one in your user directory, not the one in the installation directory (not the one in Program Files, if you use Windows).

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john s. thigpenn (thigpenn) said : 		#2

Thank you for such a fast response! And yes, I did mean "2005". John

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Paul Steichen (pksteichen) said : 		#3

Could a feature similar to the Update TLE from Internet Sources feature for satellites be incorporated for objects without completely stable orbits? This seems like it would be a very helpful feature...I think most users would assume that the software already compensates for changing orbits. Thanks.

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Paul Steichen (pksteichen) said : 		#4

Also, assuming that Stellarium does not compensate for changing orbits, would it be safe to say that it is not intended to be used to view solar system configurations from more than a few years into the past or future?

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Chantal (lachantalita) said : 		#5

There are some words in French in my message as I don't know how to explain some words in English :

2005 YU55 should be in the constellation de l'Aigle (? of the Eagle) and on Stellarium, YU55 is in 'Lion' near Mars.
How do we know who is right?
Thanks!

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Paul Steichen (pksteichen) said : 		#6

Chantal: I followed Daggarstab's advice above and the new JPL corrected position is approximately 20 minutes ahead of the old uncorrected position. So you can either follow the above process, which isn't easy...took me 2 hours to figure it out....or just advance the time on Stellarium by about 20 minutes and it should show a pretty close approximation. Good luck! Its cloudy here tonight :(