In a message dated 02/02/2000 12:45:37 PM EDT, Glensoft@aol.com writes: > I had tried to use my TelRad and sighting scope to manually follow another > satellite. VERY DIFFICULT! I've been practicing moving a 6" Dob to track satellites for the past 2 months. I would suggest starting with some of the slower moving objects like Tiros 1 (00029), Telstar 1 (00340) or EPG (16908). Next I would recommend that you plot your own predictions. There are a few advantages to this. Your TLEs can be the latest released by OIG and you can tailor you view of the sky quicker and easier from your hard drive than you can online. I'll typically plot several passes for a 30 minute time period. If one passes within a few degrees of a star that's easy for me to locate I'll make a plot that has about a 5 deg FOV and show all stars up to mag +11. Now I wait for the cue from WWV and hopefully the object show up on time. Moving the DOB take a bit of practice. Last evening I tracked NOAA 15 (25338) for about a minute. In my light polluted location between Baltimore and Washington it's about the only way I can observe objects like Telstar 1 and Tiros 1. For the record, I'm using a Discovery 6" DHQ with a Celestron Ultima 35mm eyepiece. It provides about a 1.5 deg FOV. Cheers Don Gardner 39.1796 N, 76.8419 W, 34m ASL Homepage: http://hometown.aol.com/mir16609/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 02 2000 - 09:31:10 PST