Hi All: During Apollo 15 (July 1971) and Apollo 16 (April 1972), several people made a serious attempt to observe these spacecraft. Position data was relayed over the Astronet in 3.5-4.0 Mhz amateur radio band from Bellcom in Washington, D.C. I lived in Redondo Beach, California at the time. A ham radio operator named Clark or Clarke Harris lived in nearby Gardena. He would get position data for his location and share it with me. In April 1972* I used the 16-inch schmitt-cassegrain telescope at El Camino College in Torrance, California to look for Apollo 16. I probably had the scope at in the right place and I saw some star-like objects, but I can't say for sure that I saw Apollo 16. Also, there was a photo in Sky & Telescope taken around 1970 of the TLI burn. TLI refers to trans-lunar injection, the firing of the Saturn third stage used to send the Apollo to the Moon. The photo was taken by an Australian amateur astronomer. By the way, today's Vandenberg Launch Net was partly inspired by the ham radio Astronet of the Apollo era. Regards, Brian Webb * I attempted the observation at about 03:00 UTC on a Monday when the spacraft was on its way to the Moon. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Oct 25 2002 - 20:54:21 EDT