>A good idea for manually following MIR or another sat. with a t-scope: > Do the best you can beforehand to align the telescope in a position, so >that you only need to move the scope in Declination. In otherwords, follow it >in a straight line across the sky. > using both dec. and RA manually is harder, since the telescope can easily >move off a straight line track. Because the orbit is curved, and the Earth rotating below it, the track is not "straight" (a great circle) A better approximation is a slightly negative declination, with the polar axis pointed "somewhere" above the horizon. You can find out where to point the polar axis by using three (or more) alt/az predictions (or convert RA/Dec to H.A./Dec) and compute(estimate) the point which is equidistant from "all" I wrote a program POLE.EXE to do this, and the issue was discussed on SeeSat-L twice a few years ago. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 02 2000 - 02:29:09 PST