Re: Orbit's pole

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Grzegorz Koralewski <caliban@kki.net.pl> said...
>I've tried to see the structure of Mir several times,
>but tracking it with my equatorially-mounted Newtonian
>has always been a barrier.
>Recently I thought, that actually hand-tracking would be
>much easier if I knew where the pole of the orbit
>was. What I'm looking for, is a computer program that
>will tell me RA and Dec of the orbit's pole. I would have to
>care only for one axis then.

I use an equatorially-mounted Newtonian, and inititially had problems
tracking satellites, but I got used to it.  What helped a great deal was to
point the polar axis straight up, instead of at Polaris.  This way
I had a azimuth axis and an elevation axis that were much easier to
control.  Give it a try and see if that helps.

I used a MSDOS QBASIC program called POLE for a time that would calculate
where to align the polar axis so you could just track along the RA
axis, but stopped using it once I got more adept at hand-tracking.
POLE.ZIP is at:
ftp://ftp.satellite.eu.org/pub/sat/programs/ibmpc/pole.zip   (15k)
I don't know the author's name.

It requires Mike McCant's quicksat program in order to work.  Quicksat
and other prediction programs are at:
http://www2.satellite.eu.org/orbsoft.html

The specific link for the MSDOS version of Quicksat is:
ftp://ftp.satellite.eu.org/pub/sat/programs/ibmpc/quiks213.zip   (156k)

Craig Cholar    3432p@vm1.cc.nps.navy.mil

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