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Monthly Reports — 2004 April
 
Murison spent most of his time preparing for the DDA meeting April 19-23. He and Efroimsky worked on their respective numerical and analytical investigations into the errors, both numerical and conceptual, introduced by working in a precessing frame yet assuming osculating orbital elements for particles orbiting a precessing, oblate planet.

With regard to the problem of the distance function between two confocal Keplerian orbits, Murison is looking at the problem in a coordinate frame that rotates and scales with the orbit of one of the bodies. One can use some of the analytical machinery from the elliptic restricted three-body problem, which Murison has worked on in the past. It is hoped that this will either lead to some simplifications or shed further geometric insight into the problem, or both.

Murison resumed work on the "Computational Techniques" chapter of the new Explanatory Supplement.

Murison refereed a paper for the Astronomical Journal.