Introduction (incl. bad English)

Michael Teichgräber (m.t@gmx.de)
Wed, 16 Dec 1998 23:02:01 +0000

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