Hi Robert Passes are currently about the same time now because the satellite does almost 16 orbits a day. 16 orbits =~ 90 minutes . Any satellite that does an integral number of revs/day will appear at the same time each night but of course will not be necessarily in exactly the same part of the sky as there are other things to be taken into consideration such as precession in the Right Ascension of the Ascending Node and the Argument of perigee. So the "purpose" is purely due to celestial mechanics normally but of course with X-37B there is probably a human-decided reason. Not too sure if Ill be observing it tonight - some cloud messing about so may be clouded out - as I was last night. Cheers Greg _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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