I my self do not use Debian ( i do have a beta Debian 8 on a KVM in OpenSUSE )
-- i am a redhat person so.....

at this time i do not have Ceres as a SPICE orbit
I could in the next few days , it would not take long .

but qt4 & 5 on Debian will be the same as with OpenSUSE 13 or fedora 21
the SVN code for 1.6 ( really 1.7 ) will build just fine
INSTALL!!! CSPICE!!! FIRST !!! and lua-dev5.1
builds using gcc4.8

for cspice see:
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=550



as to asteroids and orbits

all you will see is a red line and a small name of the body


you do know that "ASCII" is NOT!!! a name of a minor body
it is the name for TEXT ( English USA )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
as in typing letters on a English keyboard

the letters you type are in ascii format
that will never be a name of a body

_________________
"I don't pitch Linux to my friends, I let Microsoft do that for me."
Using OpenSUSE Leap 15 & CentOS 7.6

I usually remain in the shell, using shell script (with a preference for Zshell), awk, sed... As I use the Awesome WM, I have (very basic) knowledge of Lua. Like any sysadmin, I can read some Perl code, but would probably use something else, maybe Ruby, or Guile (when I finally get around to actually learning it).

I said "we", because I and others in Devuan like automation, and importing data from JPL into Celestia must be automatable at least for the most part. I'm sure the existing Perl scripts you mention would do the job perfectly.

Thank you John for the building information... I'm on it...



I beg to differ. 3568 ASCII (1936 UB) was discovered on October 17, 1936 by Marguerite Laugier at the Nice Observatory. It even has a WikiPedia entry.

ok, many different names

i have been working with 343 asteroids in the NAIF spice data "ast343de430.bsp" and HORIZONS
so asteroid "2003568"



will be posting in the Spice kernel section the files for JUST the asteroid Ceres
the Dawn team released a lowres map

_________________
"I don't pitch Linux to my friends, I let Microsoft do that for me."
Using OpenSUSE Leap 15 & CentOS 7.6

This is awesome, John! I'm looking forward to your postings. I guess they will appear in the Asteroids topic of the Spice kernel files.

Meanwhile, I compiled the CSpice... Next: celestia.

So, you mean Jessie, ASCII, and Ceres have other names than the ones found in the JPL Small-Body Database Browser?