> >As far as suggestions, for a computerized unit look at the > >Meade and Celestron units. > > And also at the VIXEN Skysensor 2000 PC. It can track satellites. Here is a part of a review of the Vixen... it doesn't appear to do a very good job. "Once orbital elements are entered, SkySensor can warn you when a satellite rises above the horizon. Scroll to that satellite's page, hit Go To, and the mount slews to the satellite and begins tracking it at high speed. At least in theory. When I tested this with several passes of the International Space Station and Mir, SkySensor never placed the satellite in the main telescope eyepiece. Close, within the finder, but not in the main optics. One catch: if the mount slews up from the west, when it reaches the meridian it stops and waits for you to command it to flip itself to the other half of the sky, where it will resume tracking the satellite to the east. This "about face" is unavoidable with a German equatorial mount, but it does diminish the satellite tracking feature -- just when the satellite is closest you lose sight of it for the 30 seconds it takes the mount to flip. Also, it was under high-speed tracking that I did notice some image jitter, making it that much harder to make out the shape of an orbiting object such as Mir." To ME this site has a much better option! http://canopus.saao.ac.za/~wpk/CoSaTrak/cosatrak.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Sun Aug 06 2000 - 19:47:51 PDT