Newbies are always asking "What bright sats can I see?". I have two basic answers: 1) The best way is to feed a current version of Ted Molczan's list of elsets into Mike McCants' QuickSat program and let it tell you. This is fairly close to ideal for the next few days. And you can anticipate the general seasons of visibility for most objects many, many months in advance, although the times of passage will probably be wrong by many, many minutes. Since neither NASA nor RSA provides anticipated elsets for manned vehicles nor hardly any useful information about anticipated orbits (if I am wrong about this, please, please correct me), you may wish to supplement Ted's list with elsets from SeeSat-L, from OIG, from Spacelink at MSFC, or from NASA Web pages for Mir and shuttles. For poorly observed or rapidly decaying objects, you may find supplementary elsets here on SeeSat-L, from OIG, or from various other sources. 2) Consult various lists of bright objects. Among these are the VISUAL.TLE list maintained by Jay Respler and distributed with updated elsets by TS Kelso (lacks several of the very brightest objects), the QUICKSAT.MAG file (part of QS, and available separately; pretty large, thus incorporating many lesser lights, and doesn't directly tell you how bright the object will be in your sky), the VISIBLE.HD (and VISIBLE.DAT and VISIBLE.TLE) files from OIG (showing its age and also large), my "top 40" which I posted quite a while ago to SeeSat-L (short), and my list of objects observed, which presents the brightest magnitude I've actually observed and recorded for each satellite. Your mileage may vary; i.e., it's possible the recorded magnitude may have been truly extraordinary. Thanks to Neil Clifford, the latest version of my list is now available at the following URL (25 KB): ftp://ftp.physics.ox.ac.uk/pub/sat/info/magnitudes.wn where you will find the list divided into two parts, the first compiled 1992-1994 at latitude 39N and the second compiled 1994-1996 at latitude 41N. One caveat, which I haven't mentioned lately, is that you may find it worthwhile to seek out some especially interesting, but fainter objects, particularly the NOSS 2-n objects, TiPS and EGP. Another is that all lists suffer from latitude bias. GRO is a very bright object, but not from the far north where Russell Eberst and Bj"orn Gimle are based. Bottom line, I really haven't found anything better than QS. If you have difficulty installing it and getting it running, ask someone for help. The newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav is the locus of discussion of GPS (of course, you could have used the www.dejanews.com group locator function to find that out). I saw a message there claiming that GPS has its own time reference system which requires the receiver to convert it to UTC. Also, that this internal system will overflow (loopback like an odometer) when it reaches week 1023 (binary all ones) about 1999 AUG 22, giving receivers an early test of the Year 2000 Problem. It would seem that the usability of GPS units and systems dowstream from them will depend on the adequacy of the software in the individual receivers (and downstream). Mike McCants tells me that current versions of QuickSat do increment the month correctly. (Not that I ever had the slightest doubt when to expect January 32 to arrive). Cheers. Walter Nissen dk058@cleveland.freenet.edu --- Take Back the Diamond-Studded Velvet: Support your local dark sky: http://www.darksky.org (highly recommended)