Welcome Alan to SeeSat - hope to see many more postings from you and hope that we can convert you into a serious positional observer :-)))) See you go back a longtime - as you say many of the Canadian Bulletin Board are still active today. Whilst I never dialed into it I did regularly receive the orbital elements and still have all of them stored somewhere. Interesting about developing some satellite software. Every serious observer has his own particular choices - I use QUICKSAT and HIGHFLY by Mike McCants for normal routine predicting as they are fast and usually accurate, whilst for monitoring whilst observing I use HEAVENSAT, and finally for measuring etc I use GUIDE. I would be interested in seeing your software and trying it out. One thing I would like to see in software that I have not seen yet is the ability to display a satellite track against star background as a function of the error in the prediction - i.e if the satellite is expected to be say 10 minutes early then display this track as well as the predicted track - in fact it would be nice if the time offset could be something requested by the program whilst observing. Sometimes with relatively narrow field instruments one would like to be able to position the scope so as to get the satellite to pass near the center of the field of view. One can do something similar using a plane scan but it would be far quicker to have the program display the predicted track for a given time offset and I am sure would increase the chances of seeing the satellite. Obviously one would like this software to be running in real term as many observers now are "monitor" observers. Best wishes and hope to see a lot more from you Greg _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Fri Mar 06 2015 - 01:52:23 UTC
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