(SNES) Odds and Ends

["Les Coleman" <les11@cox.net>]

HI

Quaour (Kwa whar) ought to get the Pluto debate going again big time. It is
larger than Ceres (800 miles versus 540). In fact its volume exceeds that of
all the asteroids put together. Its density is low, so it probably weighs
about 1/3  that of
the asteroid belt. Its  diameter is roughly 2/3rds of Pluto. It is in a
circular orbit about a billion miles farther out than Pluto and
circles the Sun in about 288 years. If PLuto is the ninth planet, Quaour
really deserves to be the tenth.

I've added a [overkill] tool to the FDO utility tools. It will allow you to
calculate orbits of most things in the Solar system as long as the objects
don't come too close to major planets or moons. It supports circular,
elliptical, parabolic and those hyperbolic orbits which have convergent
series (it will tell you if it can't handle a hyperbolic orbit and degrade
nicely to the best parabolic approximation). It can be found as the last
tool bar in the Utility Tools page.

Now I know that I am probably the only amateur astronomer in Southern New
England who actually cares about orbits but what the heck.  At least I
didn't try to foist VSOP87 with its incredible 31594 fifth order polynomials
on the unsuspecting world as a Java Script program. That monster written in
HTML and JavaScript is a HTML  page that comes to more than 2.7 million
bytes! And it is some of the most stupendously repititious and boring code
ever written.  Joe would just love seeing that lulu bogging down his server.

Les
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