Bob Steinke wrote: > A while ago I sent out a question asking people about the size of the > satellite watching hobby. Here's a summary of the results. I got 11 > responses. The average number of times per year people go out observing > is 70. Although that seems to be split into two classes: people who go > at least weekly, and people who go occasionally. Only five of the > respondents had ever traveled to see a specific event, and they had done > so very few times. There are still about 600 subscribers on the list. > This would be consistent with a few tens of regulars and a few hundred > lurkers. Here's some more data points. I've been mostly a lurker here since at least '99. Currently all I do is check Heavens-Above for exceptional passes of things like ISS, HST, etc... and Iridium flares. I've taken to trying to photograph the flares and some passes with my digital camera. I used to like to load McCants complete elset file and run my program in realtime mode, then try to bag as many sats as possible as they went overhead. I also used to enjoy trying to ID sats caught by accident while doing astro obs. But since it's impossible to *easily* download complete elset files I am now limited to just what Heavens- Above can do for me. I'm not devoted enough to jump through the flaming hoops of getting a SpaceTrack account and using programs to download the whole catalog just to ID that one mystery sat every couple months. <soapbox> I have to say, the whole thing with SpaceTrack has just about killed what active interest I had in this hobby. This is a perfect example of classic gov't thinking. F the little guy to gain a false sense of achievement while the real work is left undone. </soapbox> I still enjoy reading what everyone else accomplishes here on SeeSat, though. Keep up the good work!!! Brian -- http://www.skywise711.com - Lasers, Seismology, Astronomy, Skepticism ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 15 2005 - 17:29:27 EDT