How to help newbies?

Walter Nissen (dk058@cleveland.Freenet.Edu)
Fri, 28 Jul 1995 22:19:01 -0400 

Any comments about the adequacy of the response below? 
 
 
Date  Fri Jul 28 22:03:53 1995 
>From  dk058@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Walter Nissen) 
Subject  Visual Observing of Satellites 
To  markus@interaccess.com, jjmalley@maui.netwave.net 
 
> From: markus@interaccess.com (mark haas) 
> Newsgroups: sci.astro.amateur 
> Subject: SATALITE VIEWING 
> Date: Mon Jul 24 01:34:54 1995 
 
> I AM INTERESTED IN IDENTIFYING SOME OF THE SATALITES THAT PASS OVER 
> ON A GIVEN EVENING. WHATs a good PROGRAM TO USE TO PLOT ELEMENT DATA? 
> THANKS.. 
 
 
> From: jjmalley@maui.netwave.net (John J. Malley) 
> Newsgroups: sci.astro.amateur 
> Subject: Tracking satellites 
> Date: Thu Jul 27 23:33:29 1995 
 
> I'm trying to learn to track satellites visually, but I'm not having 
> much luck spotting them. I have a program to track them, and it tells 
> me when the satellites should be visible. Are there particular 
> satellites which are brighter? Which ones? 
 
> What types of things affect their visibility?  Altitude? Their 
> color???  I know they have to be in sunlight, and I have to be in the 
> dark - and I'm afraid that's exactly where I feel I am right now. 
 
> Any help would be appreciated. I'm getting tired of plotting these 
> things on the computer and not being able to spot them! 
 
> Thanks! 
 
> John 
 
Three mistakes beginners often make are using old elements, looking for 
radio dots, and using a radio-oriented program.  A program like Mike 
McCants' QuickSat addresses all of these issues.  It generates for every 
pass a heuristic value that will help you spot an elset that should be 
freshened.  It contains his photometric catalog which allows you to pick 
out only bright candidates, or at least know what you are up against if 
you choose to try for fainter objects, or newer objects with no 
observations.  It can precisely calculate shadow ingress and egress, so 
you don't waste effort looking for objects 12 magnitudes fainter than the 
limit for your sky, something that radio-oriented programs with some 
visual features don't adequately do.  QuickSat is available from the 
SeeSat-L archive, mentioned just below. 
 
The SeeSat-L mailing list serves visual satellite observers.  You may send 
subject "subscribe" to seesat-l-request@iris01.plasma.mpe-garching.mpg.de 
and also "help" and "archive help".  Volume is only maybe 3 messages a 
day. 
 
You may wish to access the archive for the many discussions of visual 
observing.  Recent messages have discussed the merits of the various lists 
and catalogs of bright objects, some of which are available from the 
archive.  Elsets for bright objects are maintained in special files by the 
OIG BBS, Celestial BBS, and kilroy.  The archive has a search facility 
called egrep. 
 
You can obtain information about the mailing list and much other material 
of interest to visual observers of Earth satellites, including Web access 
to recent traffic on the mailing list, by checking into the Web pages at: 
http://www.ipp-garching.mpg.de/~bdp/satintro.html and 
http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/sat/satintro.html. 
 
Cheers. 
 
Walter Nissen             dk058@cleveland.freenet.edu             216-243-4980 
 
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