Continuing my efforts to understand how orbits are calculated from observations, Riley Fee (Shoreland High School alumnus and current Auburn undergraduate student) and I worked through the first part of the example of calculating the orbit of 2 Pallas from Ch. 13 of Tatum’s Celestial Mechanics. I still want to justify the linear equations that this approximation solves more clearly and with a diagram.

Working with a student to understand the determination of solar system orbits from observation, I wanted to work out the process for identifying conic section from five co-planar points and did so in this Jupyter notebook: