I was able to confirm, from observing Pallas's motion through the sky from the nights of May 19 to May 20, that both the SS Pro 4 and the free 6.0 version displayed the relatively bright asteroid way off i(~50 arcminutes) its actual place. The minor planet databases was updated for both versions.
Does this happen to other minor bodies as well?
Thanks.
Scott,
50 arcminutes sounds way more than I would expect. I just looked up the coordinates using the Minor Planets Center ephemeris service and compared it with SkySafari 6. When you do this you need to make sure you enter the same location in both apps and make sure the coordinates are reported in the same epoch (J2000) in my case. Here is what I got:
I might also ask how you determined it was 50 arcminutes off? Where you relying on your GoTo and it was off by 50 arcmin? Or did you actually plate solve an image to determine this? Relying on your GoTo may not be very accurate. Did you verify you GoTo by going to a nearby star and confirming it was dead center?
Scott,
I was able to get out last night and observe Pallas. SkySafari 6 had it exactly in the position I saw it in relative to the background stars. I don't think there is any problem there. Is it possible you have the date set incorrectly in SS6 when you did this?
I do see that SS4 shows Pallas around 30' away from where it actually is. This is because the site that SS4 pulls the orbital elements from is giving us stale data. If you bring up the object info for Pallas and scroll to the bottom of the data section, you will see that the Orbit Epoch is from March of 2015. That is 4 years old. I can check to see if there is something we can do on our servers to fix this. I suspect not as I believe it was in SS5 that we switched to asking our servers where to pull data from. I believe in SS4 this was hardcoded and cannot be changed without releasing a new version of the app.
Bill, firstly, thanks for promptly replying to this query and sorry for the relatively long absence.
Well, as I'm an exclusively visual observer, I've grown accustomed, in these 9 years of SS usage, to rely on it almost exclusively as my trustworthy sky guide, for my ad hoc star hopping (look mummy, no go-to's!).
So, it was from memory from the previous night's sighting of Pallas that I came up to the conclusion said difference in position was substantially wider than my F10 scope's ~30-arcmin FOV via a 52-degree-aFOV Barlow eyepiece - hence the 50-arcminute figure. Though in retrospect, I might have overestimated it, your reporting on the lack of updating for SS4's orbital data source's, certainly confirms that as being the unfortunate culprit.
Also, since I'm dealing directly with one of the developers, may I take the opportunity to declare both my admiration for such a comprehensive and thorough planetarium as well as that I'm aware you're going the extra mile here in showing actual concern for a phased out version of your software. I'll totally understand if nothing can be done, given SS4's age. But, if anything, such great customer support only whets my appetite for upgrading to SS6 Pro as soon as is financially viable to me. Thank you!