Hi Derek There is no need to observe and get positional info on satellites that appear in the SPACETRACK catalog - of course you can observe these for pleasure etc but no need to do positions unless you are looking for some practice. SPACETRACK usually tracks their objects on a regular basis and have no use for amateur observations. What I do usually is download three files from Mikes site - the CLASSIFIED.tle, INT.tle and INT96.tle files. From CLASSIFIED.TLE I ignore the high altitude objects and check what LEO satellites have not been observed in the past 30 days or so and put those elements together. I then add the entire INT.TLE file, and finally add the few INT96.TLE objects that do not appear in INT.TLE, so this then is my list of targets. I then look through this and see what has not been observed in the past month or so and make a note. I also note what molniya type orbit satellites are visible - here I take all that are visible because quite a few of them do perform orbit changes, and these will be my targets for the evening. This file, along with the SPACETRACK big TLE collection , is then loaded into HEAVENSAT so I usually have something like 12000 objects loaded. Of course I do not observe all the objects - this could take quite a few hours - the longest tracking session I ever had was about 7 hours but I usually stick to 4 hours which is the DVD disk capacity. Other things can affect the choice of what I observe - eg cloud , phase angle , moonlight ,local buildings etc and how sore my bum gets from sitting on an uncomfortable chair for too long. Hope this helps. Cheers Greg ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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