LinOccult

Observations of stellar occultation by asteroids will make significant impact in several areas of astronomy. Observations of these events by professional and amateur astronomers are extremly important since thay can provide unique information about the size of asteroids and improve their orbit elements dramatically.

LinOccult computes predictions of such occultation of stars by asteroids.

LinOccult has been developed for Linux and distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

To compute time and coordinates of occultation events you need the following data:

1. DE405 - Major planets ephemeris.
2. Star catalog(s).
3. astorb.dat - asteroid orbits.

To display occultation coordinates on Earth surface you need to have the following applicatons:

1. PovRay.
2. EarthView.

LinOccult is a stand alone program and can be loaded by the following command:
./linoccult ConfigFile

Technical details:

TODO list:

1. To rewrite the following modules: 3D matrix, vectors and time processing procedures. DE405 ephemeris reader.
2. To create database for output data to output results in different formats.
3. To improve application performance: Find a method for fast search all stars near defined point. Keep calculated asteroid orbits as a Chebishev poly.
4. To develop a GUI.
5. To create a make files.
6. To write a documentations.

Plekhanov Andrey