Morning Scott I will be only too pleased to answer any questions you may have. The use of a DSLR camera for geosats is nothing new on SeeSat- for example Marco uses his DSLR and Ian Roberts in Randburg, South Africa does the same. Ive already done some geosats with my DSLR using a 200mm focal length lens which convinced me it was worth following up with my camera. All I am basically doing now is increasing the aperture of the telescope. It will certainly be a welcome addition if you and Cees get more involved with geosat observing as those satellites need more observers to get a better longitude coverage. Scott Campbell used to do an excellant job of covering his part of the geobelt but due to other activities he appears to have lost interest which is a great pity as he had the best optical setup of any amateur observer. Your operating from the west coast will fill a gap that has always existed in your area so I, for one, would be very happy to see you and Cees providing extra coverage, not so much on the real geosats but on the many objects drifting around the world, some of which are very infrequently observed due to our poor longitude coverage. The software that Cees has written and which you and he use has provided a major breakthrough for allnight observing. I just wish I could implement it here but Im still stuck with the much "loved" microsoft stuff. Of course if you want to do what Ian and I do - ie use APEX for the measuring - APEX is the software used by the ISON network - I will be only too happy to tell you where to get it and how to use it as ISON has given me permission to distribute it to worthwhile observers. It does have a mode where if several images of a particular field are all taken at the same hour angle it will process the images and automatically detect all non-stellar- ie satellite - objects in the field and identify them - if known objects. This would be fine for automatic patrol work. It is an area that western amateurs have not yet explored but you will have to use microsoft. So fire away with any questions although frankly I know you and Cees are perfectly capable of doing it without any input from me :-)) Good luck Greg _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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