Microsoft Streets & Trips has a "find" function with a latitude/longitude mode. All you have to do is cut & paste from your transit report (you can also cut & paste into CalSKY, after selecting WGS84 coordinates- it'll convert to "eastings" and "northings" for you). S&T also has drawing tools, a tool for measuring distances, and a "location tool" that'll read out lat. & long. as you move the mouse cursor around. See, for example, the S&T map near the middle of http://iss-transit.sourceforge.net I also have a DeLorme GPS for laptops, and the mapping program that came with it. But I never took the trouble to investigate whether or not it has all the features of S&T, since I got the latter before I got DeLorme (I've used DeLorme in the field, since the GPS won't work with S&T). Don't worry excessively about positioning, since the width of the ISS's solar panels is 78 meters / 256 feet. And despite John's recent solar transit bull's-eye, it's remains an open question as to how much of that was luck, and how much of it was real, repeatable prediction accuracy. Another reason not to worry too much about positioning is that orbital velocity is ~ 4.8 miles per second. At 10 fps, it'll travel nearly 1/2 mile between frames, so it'll be important (especially for planetary "encounters"), to shoot at 30 fps if you can (cutting the inter-frame travel distance to about 800 feet, or about 3 "panel-widths"). ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 12 2004 - 17:21:28 EST