[BAA Comets] MPC Acknowledgement issue resolved

[Peter Carson]

Thanks to Nick James and Denis Buczynski I now understand what the MPC auto 
acknowledgement is telling me and have resolved the unreadable observation 
line issues.
It seems some of my MPC report was something other than Plain Text which is 
vital for the MPC computer to recognize it. I cut and paste from other 
individual reports in Windows and this may have introduced a non Plain Text 
format so was unreadable by the MPC’s computer.
I use Mozilla Thunderbird as a mailer and have changed its account settings 
to select all Plain Text options and turn off any HTML options. In the 
Composition and Addressing window I’ve unchecked “compose message in html”.
Having made these changes I now get an MPC acknowledgement that records the 
correct number of observation lines in the report.

Peter

-----Original Message----- 
From: Nick James
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2018 5:59 PM
To: Peter Carson ; BAA comet group
Subject: Re: [BAA Comets] MPC Acknowledgement

Hi Peter,

Zero doesn't look good. It implies that their parser is not seeing any
valid observations after the header. You need to make sure you are
sending the file as plain text, not a MIME attachment or HTML.

If you want you can send me an example of your astrometry in exactly the
way you send it to the MPC and I'll have a look when I get in.

Nick.


On 23/01/2018 15:15, Peter Carson wrote:
> Hi All,
> I've just noticed that whenever I send an astrometry report to the MPC I 
> get an automatic acknowledgment that says "Number of observation lines 
> read = 0"
> What does this mean? Hopefully it doesn't indicate that the the MPC's 
> computer didn't read any of my observations.
> See example below.