One more thing to ponder for next year. All of the positions given in the solar and planetary ephemerides are of date whereas the positions given for asteroids, comets etc. are J2000.0. In the old days, positions of date were useful for finding planets in the daytime using setting circles but I don’t see that they are particularly useful now. Should we change the planetary ephemerides to use J2000.0?
There is an interesting discussion about whether the standard epoch will ever change from J2000.0 now. With the removal of leap seconds, civil time has been decoupled from the rotation of the Earth so why not decouple celestial coordinates as well? If that happens keeping positions of date might be a good idea.