Skysafari 6 pro comet and asteroid databases are tiny !! Why is this ? In SkySafari 5 the comet and asteroid databases are very large. Not happy with ver 6 for this reason.
Richard
Date
Votes
9 comments
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Bill Tschumy Richard,
Why do you think it is tiny? It is actually bit bigger than SS5 and we now incorporate recent comet and asteroids into the database much more quickly.
Bill
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rge102840 Ok Bill, I must be missing something then: when I press "search" , then select comets, only 4 or five comets pop up. How do I access the rest of the comet database ?
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rge102840 I'm still wondering how to access the complete comet and asteroid database, not just the "brightest comets and asteroids" ? Please enlighten me.
Richard.
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Bill Tschumy Richard,
I'm sure I wrote up a response to this yesterday, but maybe I forgot to hit Submit.
The complete database has around 3,500 comets and around 750,000 asteroids. We decided there was no point in having a long list of faint comets in the Comets list. It is now called "Brightest Comets" and has all comets with a visual magnitude brighter than 16.
You can still do an explicit search for any other comet. If you really want to, you can use the Planner and search just for comets and get back all the comets in the DB. Note that in iOS and Mac, the Planner is limited to finding 10,000 objects so you can see the entire asteroid database that way.
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rge102840 The Comet and asteroid treatment in ver 5 is MUCH better !!
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Bill Tschumy Why?
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Sureshks1 Bill,
The missing comets is really causing a problem. Comet brightnesses rarely follow predictions. There are several comets now that are brighter than 16th magnitude that are not in the list. How can I get them back?
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Keiron Smith Hi Comet Hunter,
Please update your daily data:
SkySafari Settings > Solar System > Update Minor Planet Data
Check your results and please also join the following discussions:
Where Is The Minor Orbit Data Downloaded From? (Answer: MinorPlanetCenter.Net)
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Sureshks1 Hi Keiron,
I know about the minor planet update. My app was fully up to date at the time. We need all of the comets to show in the list. I'm not certain why this capability was removed.
As mentioned, comets can brighten and dim unpredictably. The minor planet updates are often well off what is observed, and the app is slow to update with new magnitude information. I had this very conversation with your staff at NEAF in 2018.
Also, with imagers easily reaching 17th magnitude and fainter now, we really do need all comets to be available to us.
Thankfully, I still have SkySafari 5 on my phone, which does show all comets. However, this version of the app doesn't have scope control, so I'll have to figure out how to move my mount manually based on RA & Dec when I am searching for comets.
Suresh
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