Kurt, I appreciate your response. The reason I was asking about the site was that I once had it in my web browser's bookmarks, but somehow managed to lose it when I underwent a browser upgrade. The fun thing about being able to get "newsworthy" asteroids loaded into Starry Night is that it then becomes easy to create movies of what a person might see observing them. Monday night we'll have a medium-close encounter with 2007 TU24, which will be visible to observers with small telescopes. What I wanted to know was what the asteroid would look like from a plain-vanilla 6" Dob with a 25 mm standard-issue eyepiece. I compressed about a half-hour of observing into a 15 second movie. That little asteroid then appears to fairly fly among the stars in the field of view. Then for grins, I transport myself and telescope to the asteroid itself, and watch the Earth encounter by compressing abut three days into a movie 30 seconds long. Very cool. Seth -----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com on behalf of Canopus56 Sent: Fri 1/25/2008 4:21 PM To: Utah Astronomy List Serv Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Asteroid orbital elements for Starry Night? Seth, You're welcome. - Kurt P.P.S. - As a point of amateur practice beyond the scope of your original question, there are three other sources for the most recent orbital elements for current "hot" inbound comets and asteriods. Sometimes there is a delay between the announcement of the newest orbital solution for a reacquired inbound comet and the updating of the MPC third-party-software data files. In that case, the orbital elements have to be entered into your software manually, something that personally I'm useless at. Personally, I don't go this far for simple visual observing. NEO Minor Body applet http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/ JPL NASA Ephemeris http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi Harvard MPC Comet Orbital elements list http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Comets/index.html Sometimes the NEO-JPL sources are more timely in updating the most current orbital elements than the master Harvard Minor Planet Center list (e.g. for P17/Holmes). I like the NEO applet the best. Orbital elements change on each pass due to non-gravitational forces (like jets coming of a comet or the pressure of sunlight on asteriods). The NEO applet lets you choose between the most recent hot-of-the-press orbital elements and the historical passes, sometimes going back to the 1800s. ____________________________________________________________________________ ________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://gallery.utahastronomy.com Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com