CODE catalogue news and release notes.

Summer 2025

This is version 3.4.0 of the CODE catalogue/database which is the significant update and extension with numerous new comets added to the database.

Now, the CODE database includes 983 orbital solutions for 369 comets with full uncertainty estimates and dynamical classifications, covering nearly all comets with original semi-major axes exceeding 10,000 au and discovered before 2022, as well as all LPCs discovered beyond 10 au from the Sun during during this period, and over 80% of the known LPCs with perihelion distances beyond 7 au. Several new functionalities are added to the interface and all documentation has been updated.

This CODE update is described in a paper accepted for A&A (currently in print) with a preprint available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20780

November 2023

Major update has been performed for the CODE Catalogue. Now we present 766 sets of orbits for 312 LPCs, including 258 Oort Cloud comets.

The calculation of 'previous' and 'next' orbits has been completely revised. First - we apply much more precise methods, second - we present two variants of these orbits: with and without stellar perturbations.

Were added sets of orbits for the complete sample of 29 Oort Cloud comets discovered in 2018, 2019, 2020, and January 2021, and four other LPCs from the same period.

For more than 30 Oort Cloud comets were included several orbits using at least three basic types of data sets selected from available positional data (pre- and post-perihelion data and the entire data set), and different forms of NG~acceleration representing water ice or CO sublimation.

New solutions for several other comets were included — for which data arcs are longer than they were at the moment of orbit determination for the initial CODE Catalogue. This also includes cases of pre-discovery measurements found sometime after these comets discoveries; see for example C/2007 W1 (Boattini), C/2015 R3 (PanSTARRS), and C/2017 K1 (PanSTARRS).

The new [O-C] pictures additionally include information about the distribution of weights within the data arcs.