Hi everybody, I've been an astronomy fan for about 30 years and a ship's navigator practicing the dying art of celestial navigation for the last 25. Started getting interested in observing satellites after watching an Atlas V launch at the cape a couple years back and then sighing the centaur and payload the following night using Orbitron predictions. Caught sight of the fuel dump on USA 198 in December and that got me hooked. My wife and I have been out just about every clear night since. She's actually better at sighting the satellites coming over the tree line than me. I'm coming up on retirement in the next few years and we've decided that this will be our new joint hobby as we start getting gray. We live along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, USA (36.8N 076.5W), moderate light pollution from Norfolk but on average I can still get +4mag with the naked eye and +6 with binoculars. I have been looking at some of the setup and would like to go with something like Scott Campbell is using. Really interested in find USA 195 (WGS SV-1) but not sure exactly how to start searching or if I would even be able to see it being located at 76 degrees West longitude. I had read somewhere that it was thought to be somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Seems like my field of sky would get me over to the Prime meridian but with so many GSO sat's, not sure if I could ID it if I did image it. Anyways, hope to learn a lot from you all and become a useful observer. Tim Luton ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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