Trying "New" Equipment, Preliminary Results Are Promising

From: Charles Phillips via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 19:39:30 -0600 (MDT)
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/
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Received on Thu Oct 31 2019 - 20:40:22 UTC

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