Just wanted to come back to the list and say hi. Still in Tustin, Southern California, observing sats by eye and binoculars. Before Space-Track I used to get mccants.tle from Mike McCants' site every few days and print out a list of all sats brighter than mag 3.5 to observe them by eye. Thanks, Mike, for providing that for so long! I used Rob Matson's skymap.exe with the SGP4 NORAD orbit propagation model. Now that Space-Track is here, I tried getting their "Visible Satellites" list and doing the same thing. This is not a criticism, but I do notice that I get fewer sats to observe. Possible reasons: * fewer sats (visible.txt is 9X smaller than a recent copy of mccants.tle) * no magnitudes in the file so skymap.exe uses default magnitudes, etc. In your experience with Space-Track, do you recommend that I use their "visible" list? Or shall I try the long "Full Satellite Catalog"? A big list may include sats for which different orbit models are appropriate, so that a prediction run with the SGP4 model may generate poor predictions for some sats. Or maybe Mike can publish a list of sats that used to go into mccants.tle, so that we can setup our own scripts to extract Mike's sats from the full list. Just inviting ideas. Mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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