Question/feature request: exporting object state with and at the observations

When I load an object in find_orb, I can step with the up and down keys through the individual observations and see the state of the object at that particular point in time.

I'm interested in using find_orb/fo to export the calculated distances to the observer and the sun - Delta and r - to associate them with the actual observed magnitude at the time of the observations. Unfortunately there seems to exist no option to export this data, (with fo: to include it with each observation in total.json). Creating ephemerides with either find_orb or fo only seems to allow a fixed step size and the observations may be spaced very irregularly.

I want to create a chart of observed comet magnitudes vs calculated distances and this would be very useful for that.

[Bill-Gray]

Sorry for the very late reply on this! Dunno how it slid past me...

It may no longer be of much help to you, but I think what you need to do here is to create an ephemeris with the "step size" set to "Obs". Do that, and the start and end times of the ephemeris, the number of steps, and the location are ignored; the ephemeris will be for the times of observation as seen from those observatories.

This is documented, but just barely. (The Find_Orb documentation is in need of major revision. Among other things, there are a lot of "interesting" improvements that doubtless go unused, simply because nobody but me knows about them...)