This was one for the lazy observer: Sleep a little longer, have a decent breakfast and then when everybody else was outside looking for Easter eggs (that's the custom in Germany at least) I casually put a sun filter on my scope and went to the window to observe a transit of the ISS in front of the Sun's disk at 8:36:49 UTC, 12-APR-09. Didn't have to leave the house for it! The only problem with this is that by the time you realize the ISS is there and you try to observe some details it's almost gone already! I better take a video next time to be able to press a rewind button. But as this year's Easter coincides with the anniversary of the first human spaceflight (and the first Shuttle flight) I felt I had to postpone looking for Easter eggs for a few minutes. While the Spacetrack TLEs with epoch 09100.57041343 which I used for calculating the transit were early by one second the elements posted by NASA-JSC on 8-APR-09 were accurate to 0.1 sec. So I'll better use them next time around. Happy Easter and Happy Human Spaceflight Anniversary, Gerhard HOLTKAMP Darmstadt, Germany, 49.8822N, 8.6558E ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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