Afternoon all, Noted the problems with HEAVENSAT. I did raise the manner of how the authors program worked and here is the answer I got: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From: "HeavenSat" <HeavenSat@mail.ru> To: "Greg Roberts" <grr@telkomsa.net> Subject: Re[2]: New version Date: 20 October 2006 05:26 PM Hi! GR> I have been running the full SpaceTrack catalog (~8500 GR> objects) + Classified.TLE (~170 sats) with no problems, GR> but Im curious as to how the program manages it. At the GR> start one selects a time and how wide a window and then GR> displays the satellites available , but its not the complete GR> 8500 objects) - I guess you only list satellites that are GR> not more than (say ) 20 degrees below the horizon?, so GR> if one wants to use a time (say) 4 hours later it is GR> necessary to redo the complete "calculation" as the GR> number of satellites visible, and potentially visible in GR> the near future, is different from what it was for the first GR> run - clever! You are right. Every 7 minutes program calculates all satellites that will be above horizon for about 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after date of recalculation. It helps to shrink all 8500 satellites to 1000 for calculating in real time. In addition in real time frequency of recalculation for each satellite depends on its angular speed to observer relative to field of view and window viewport size, except for selected satellite. GR> Do you subscribe to the SeeSat news group- its the group GR> of Visual satellite observers - free of course - and where GR> most of the serious trackers post their observations. Not, but I periodically read SeeSat archives on site. Best regards, Aleks. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ so maybe Aleks's comments might explain the situation better. I did indeed find that one can go significantly past the window defined at the start of the program but eventually I did get a wrong field display so all I did was CLEAR the stuff in memory and defined a new "window" time and all was then correct. However it is clear that this could be a problem so Ive posted the SeeSat comments to Aleks. Mike said he couldnt get a display of the objects RA/Dec --true only az/el are shown in real time in bottom left corner, but if you right click on the satellite you will find RA/Dec/phase angle/long/lat etc. One may notice that in the latest version (1.97) one can also produce an ephemeris. I must admit the format of the ephemeris is biased in my favour and strangely (:-))) is how I requested it-- it just happens to be the format needed to drive my CoSaTrak system :-)). No doubt other observers may want RA/Dec output as well - Im sure Aleks could add this to the ephemeris with no problem so let him know your wishes. With any new program there are bound to be glitches - its only by letting the author of the program know there is that it can be corrected. So I still stand by my statement that I regard this as one of the best programs for visual observers - video especially - that has so far appeared . If anyone knows of a better one I certainly would like to know about it ! Cheers Greg ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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