>spending a lot of time identifying unids (and usually >unsuccessfully). What is best program / software, IYHO? Findsat works well for me. Other good ones that people use are IDSat, SkyMap, and ObsReduce. Especially for bright objects, Quicksat and Highfly can often be used successfully by defining a "box" in alt-az or RA-Dec. To me, two keys would be (1) to get two positions if not three or more (and I'm not good at getting positional measurements), and (2) to make sure you're using an elset file that will contain the object you saw. With my 8x42, in the great majority of cases mccants.tle works, and if necessary adding leo.tle and eccen.tle will almost always include what I saw. Those are the files I regularly download for predictions. Especially for very faint objects seen with a telescope, a complete file -- alldat.tle -- is required. It's rare that I need to get that file; the last time was for what turned out to be a flashing non-operational GPS payload. There are three specific objects not included in those files, USA 116, 129, and 161. But their elements frequently appear here. I need to get less powerful binoculars with a smaller field of view, because I see too many unids.... Just kidding. But I don't try to ID many of them any more, because, especially on nice nights, there are so many. Using mccants.tle, leo.tle, and eccen.tle, running predictions for objects one might expect to see given the optics used provides hundreds of objects. I just used +7 magnitude cut-off, which I can see with 8x42 on a very nice moonless night. I got almost 800 predictions -- and that was just Quicksat. No wonder we see unids. Monday evening Mike observed this one flashing once per second: B-SAT 2B 1 26864U 01029B 04174.35915506 .00000016 00000-0 21325-5 0 2941 2 26864 2.9104 181.6041 5468278 323.8125 9.2798 4.54014377 48865 It's a Japanese comsat whose launch did not get it to a salvageable orbit. I was able to see SCD 2 (98-060A, 25504) flashing brightly (at least +4.0) for at least a few seconds on three nights out of four, and Mike and Fred saw it the other night. An octagon rotating over 32 RPM, it flashes a little faster than every .25 second. I wish its inclination were more than 25 degrees. Cloudy here Tuesday night. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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