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    • MPEC 2013-A21 : EDITORIAL NOTICE

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    M.P.E.C. 2013-A21                                Issued 2013 Jan. 5, 18:53 UT

     The Minor Planet Electronic Circulars contain information on unusual
         minor planets and routine data on comets.  They are published
   on behalf of Commission 20 of the International Astronomical Union by the
          Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory,
                          Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.

             Prepared using the Tamkin Foundation Computer Network

                              MPC@CFA.HARVARD.EDU
            URL https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/    ISSN 1523-6714

                               EDITORIAL NOTICE

   The Minor Planet Center is announcing a number of items relevant to
observers.  Comments or reports of problems with these new features should be
sent by e-mail to tspahr@cfa or via an on-line Feedback form.

1. New NEOCP Landing Page

   A new NEOCP landing page has been developed that allows observers to sort
the objects in a wide variety of ways.  The new page is
https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/NEO/toconfirm_tabular.html.  The two
existing NEOCP pages (ordered by discovery date and Right Ascension) will
continue to be updated for the forseeable future.

   Ideally, any scripts that attempt to parse the existing pages will be
rewritten to use the new text file which contains the data from the NEOCP page:
https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/NEO/neocp.txt.  This is a pure ASCII file
containing the data for one object on one line.

2. NEOCP Desirability Scores

   The MPC is introducing an NEOCP follow-up desirability score (NDS) to assist
observers in selecting NEOCP targets to provide the most needed and
effective observations for orbit improvement.  Our goal is to distribute
the limited follow-up resources efficiently and to provide the highest
number of NEOCP objects with adequate coverage for preliminary orbital
solutions.  The basic NDS is the digest2 score, which is then modified to
take into account the number of observations, the span of observations, the
nominal absolute magnitude, and the interval between observations.  The MPC
would like to note that too often the "easiest" objects to observe are
over-observed, and other objects that need follow-up are ignored.  We request
observers use the NDS to assist them in making their valuable observations
more useful still.

3. mpc@cfa vs obs@cfa

   The e-mail submission of observations should now be made to obs@cfa,
rather than mpc@cfa.  We are announcing a cut-off date of 2013 Mar. 1
for observation submissions to mpc@cfa.  After that date, any observation
batches sent to mpc@cfa will not be forwarded to the automated processing
routines.  The address mpc@cfa will continue as a general contact address
for the MPC.

A. U. Tomatic                (C) Copyright 2013 MPC           M.P.E.C. 2013-A21

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