Talk:617 Patroclus

New discoveries
Acording to this, Patroclus is a Comet. And it's moon was named Menoetius. &mdash; Hurricane Devon  (  Talk  ) 20:27, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Has the satellite really been named yet officially? Only source I've managed to find is the press release.--JyriL talk 21:26, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070223211445/http://www.keckobservatory.org/article.php?id=77 to http://www.keckobservatory.org/article.php?id=77

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OK, riddle me this...
AKA "whose ding-dong do I have to suck to make this work?":

How do we put the semi-major axis of the binary system itself / the co-orbital distance / whatever you want to call it into the infobox on the right-hand margin of the page? It seems to demand particular heading keywords before it will display a line, and as "semimajor" is already defined for (the barycentre of) this trojan binary's orbit around the sun, it won't display a second instance of it. It accepts the rotational period just fine, but how do we enter how far apart the two members are? Is there actually anything defined for that, or is it simply "too new" an idea to have been adopted into the Planet Infobox yet?

If anyone comes along in days/weeks/months/centuries to come, finds this query and has the answer, then the data is already sitting invisibly in the table, next to the second instance of "semimajor". All you need to do is change that to a heading keyword that actually works and it'll magically appear. Or if someone (or a bot) has since zapped that "dead" info out of the box, it's simply the (Johnston archive) initial and (Keck-)refined estimates as listed in the main article itself, plus their appropriate citelinks.

I'm going to see if any helppage is already defined for that infobox itself, but given previous travails trying to get help with the idiosyncratic markup language of WP, I don't hold any confidence that I'll find the answer. 146.199.0.203 (talk) 18:47, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Further question
How the sam hill do we edit that transcluded "largest trojans" table? There's only a curly-bracketed title-link given for it, and nothing clickable that leads to the table by itself, or a master page that includes it. Do we have to copy and paste that to the addressbar after the en dot wikipedia dot org slash w slash bit? Stupid thing has totally broken the normal "if you can see it, you can edit it" wikipedia standard.

Seeing as it currently says a diameter of 140km for Patroclus, which even if it wasn't outdated information anyway is still incorrectly rounded off; the mean of the old best-guess data was approx 140.6km, which would round off to 141km. Including the more up-to-date figures (143km and 154km) on top of that gives an arithmetic mean of 146.53km and a geometric of 146.43, which together fall just short of 146.5, therefore the figure should probably be corrected to at least 146km, if indeed not 154km...

It wouldn't affect the system's standing in the table, as Hektor is still a lot larger but it would at least give it a little extra separation from Agamem... non..... waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaait a minute.

Wait just one minute. That table is screwed up anyway. The articles for Agamemnon and Diomedes say that they're 167km and 164km respectively, not the much smaller sizes in the table. The run from 2nd to 4th should be a fairly close run thing going Agamemnon-Diomedes-Patroclus. Assuming of course the other entries aren't themselves even larger, as I haven't got down to them yet.

Honestly, how do we fix this? It's rather laughable that the link-table says one set of figures, but the articles an entirely different set.

Starting to think that there should be one central set database of planetary parameters, and each page or table has to link into that in order to retrieve the numerical data, so that it's always up to date, and the same figure is shown everywhere on the site... the admin on this stuff is just getting out of hand. 146.199.0.203 (talk) 20:00, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
 * See JPL_SBDB_Jupiter_Trojans. Ruslik_ Zero 20:23, 4 March 2018 (UTC)