All - For those who might consider contributing observations but are not ready to spend much money... After MUCH effort I am very close. My situation is complicated since I live in hot and humid Houston, Texas and can get usable photos only during the winter. There is no point in spending a lot of money to be able to get observations only three months per year. Last winter I worked on my techniques with my inadequate Sony camera - one real limitation was the fact that I could not set the time accurately, I had to do it by hand. So I went out and bought a used Nikon D200 camera, a used 35 - 105 mm focal length lens, and a GP-1 unit to provide a connection to GPS. Total cost was $231.65 US dollars. At first it did NOT see any GPS satellites and I was wondering if the GP-1 unit was not working, but then I did the natural thing and reseated the cable on both ends. It worked. I took some test photos from my house and they look great and should resolve just fine in Astrometry.net. I did not get a chance to go my normal place and get photos of satellites but hope to do that tomorrow night. EXIFTool reports a good time to a hundredth of a second - this agrees with an app on my phone; I will do some testing to verify the accuracy of the time. It also shows Lat and Long which I will compare to what my phone gives me. With this system I should be able to get satellites up to 1000 km or so, I am going to try to get some semi- synchronous ones as well. In the Spring I am going to test the system to see how late in the season I can get usable photos (this also depends on how many mosquitoes, etc we have). I can see a good arc of the geosynchronous belt but wonder if there are any satellites there that are not already well tracked. Charles Phillips Spaceflight Research, LLC Houston, Texas 713-882-4578 sites.google.com/site/spaceflightresearchprojects/ _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Thu Oct 31 2019 - 20:40:22 UTC
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