Okay.... Have to share a definite "GRRRR!" moment to get it off my chest. Around Christmas I obtained a nice small portable Meade ETX-70 telescope (7cm/F5 refractor). With 14x magnification it has a FOV over 3 degrees. It is small and lightweight and I can transport it in a small backpack on my bicycle to my darker second location if necessary. I tried to do my first visual position determinations with it just half an hour ago from Cospar 4353, on NOSS 3-4 A and C (07-027A,C). The good news: I easily spotted both sats crossing nicely through the FOV. And I got two points with the stopwatch (new too) on both. But then: I am not used to the stopwatch yet, so when I wanted to read out the times from the Lap memory...you get it, I clicked a wrong button first. Instead of "recall" I clicked the button that said "lap/split*reset" (logical, as I wanted to read the lap times, but wrong...and fatal). And so I accidentally erased the times. GRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!! Well, guess you all have been there once... New attempt on another night.... * sigh * - Marco PS: found a very nice way to quickly aim the scope (which doesn't have a finder scope) by hand when not using the computer drive. I have a strong 5 mw green laserpointer than gives a visible ray at night. I discovered that when you shine it into the eyepiece of the scope, it will give a nice ray coming from the scope objective, which neatly points to where the scope is pointing. ----- Dr Marco Langbroek - SatTrackCam Leiden, the Netherlands. e-mail: sattrackcam@wanadoo.nl Cospar 4353 (Leiden): 52.15412 N, 4.49081 E (WGS84), +0 m ASL Cospar 4354 (De Wilck): 52.11685 N, 4.56016 E (WGS84), -2 m ASL SatTrackCam: http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek/satcam.html Station (b)log: http://sattrackcam.blogspot.com ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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