Hi, I had a decent ISS pass about an hour ago. I was set up to use my 25cm f/5.6 Dobsonian reflector to look for structure. It was remarkably easy in spite of less than ideal conditions. It was -10C with some high haze so seeing was not good. I was using a 25 mm eyepiece which gives 56X and a decent filed of view. By picking up the ISS at about 10 degrees above the southwest horizon, it was easy to track. Even at low elevations, the fat T-shape was easy to see with the width of the new solar array being obvious. As others have commented, it has a distinct orange colour. I am very encouraged by this observation for a couple of reasons. I accidentally used a low cost Kellner eyepiece instead of the Plossl that I usually use. (Grabbed the wrong one off the shelf in the observatory and didn't notice until I was putting things away.) Also the seeing was not at all good. Under better conditions, the views through a telescope should be very impressive. A trick I have used that others might try when looking a bright satellites in a telescope is that I put a couple of different coloured filters on the eyepiece to reduce the effect of the diffraction spikes. Those spikes kill any chance of seeing the structure. I did not use filters this evening as the atmosphere was doing a good job of dropping the brightness. I also saw the Progess leading the ISS but for me it was a binocular object. Brian ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Tue Dec 12 2000 - 16:24:35 PST