Hello! Some days ago I joined the list and since then I've been very surprised about so much traffic in my mailbox. I live in a village near Stuttgart in the south of Germany, few kilometers apart from Friedrich Schiller's (the German poet) birthplace Marbach. I know, this doesn't belong here because he most probably didn't observe any artificial satellites. Sorry. Besides studying electrical engineering, astronomy and recently observing satellites have become my hobbies. Three years ago I made my first steps, looking for (and sometimes finding) geosynchronous satellites, like the 7 ASTRAs (1995 only 4) or TV-SAT2 with my 80mm-telescope. In my spare time I work on a satellite passes prediction home page. Combined with a HTML-form the CGI-program has been doing its toilsome prediction job for 1 1/2 years now, using the 'visual.tle'-elsets from Celestrak and recently some of the very up-to-date elsets from Alan Pickup's home page. With the result of these predictions I watched some fascinating passes, like Progress or Space-Shuttles following MIR (e.g. 3JUN98 21:07 UT, MIR+Discovery). On Dec. 9th I saw my first and last pass of ISS + STS-88. Although the home page is written in German language, you may want to have a look at it: http://www.ba-stuttgart.de/~abauer/sat/index.html The basic terms should be understandable. First you can choose between either a prediction of visual.tle satellites over some hours or a 5..20 -day-prediction for 1..10 satellites. The location can be specified by picking a (European) town from a list or by filling in geographical coordinates. In the latter case a time zone has to be chosen. At the moment for locations outside Europe this is very easy: GMT/UT :( Thanks for listening, Michael Teichgräber Benningen, 48°54'N 9°13'O m.t@gmx.de