Before I offer some thoughts on the OIG situation, here are some Tuesday evening (10 June UTC) observations: Iridium 38 (pred. +5, obs. +3.5?), Iridium 41 (pred. -2, obs. -2), and USA 81 (21949, 92-23A) sparkling at one-power (+2.5). I saw flashing episodes from Iridium 11 at about 2:48:40, 2:48:55, and a really bright flash at about 2:50:05. I'm pretty sure I saw a series of one- power flashes from Iridium 20 (a.k.a. Ir 18, #24871) at about 2:55:40-45. (The uncertainty was that it was quite low in the sky, so they weren't very bright; also I didn't see the beginning of the episode.) Now, regarding OIG, Richard Fredrick (rfredric@tfs.net), on Tue, 09 Jun 1998, at 23:34:54 -0500, wrote: > First, I want to make clear that I owe a huge debt of gratitude > to Mike McCants, Ted Molczan, T.S. Kelso, Alan Pickup and Allen > Thompson for their years of work in bringing to the "Net" the > TLE's on which our hobby depends. I've only been observing satellites for 2.25 years, but I want to vigorously second what Richard said above. Many very appreciative thank yous to the five named -- and all others! -- who've been providing elements sets to the rest of us!! Now, belatedly, I'll add some thoughts on the potential Web-only situation. First, in general, if even one person can get a desired group of elsets from OIG and put it in an FTP and/or Web site and/or e-mail it to someone who does, then others would be able to get the data. And perhaps an "elsets-only" mailing list could be set up for those without Web or FTP access. Another method of distribution could be the Usenet newsgroup. Now here are a couple of specific "plans": 1. My understanding of the messages I've read so far is that it appears that OIG will (may?) provide *ALL* their elsets in one file to at least a few users in some way. If so, then the main problem is smaller, but still large, files. Maybe OIG will make special arrangements for certain files containing several hundred or up to 1,500 objects, such as Mike McCants' leo.tle, eccen.tle, and geo.tle files. The Molczan.tle file consists of leo.tle plus classified objects. If OIG will make such special arrangements for a very few large files, then maybe things will work out with only a limited amount of transitional confusion. 2. If all else fails, I'll be glad to join the others who've said they would cooperate in a collaborative effort to collect needed elsets. One consideration that I think someone else mentioned is prioritizing elements. One important priority is the stability of the elements. Objects within a few days of decay would be the highest priority, and their elements need to be acquired as frequently as they are updated. (Perhaps OIG would consider setting up a mailing list for such objects.) The next priority is maneuvering and high-drag objects; their elements would need to be acquired at least every day. The lowest priority objects would be "dead" objects that encounter very little atmospheric drag. It might be sufficient to get elements for those once per week or even less frequently. The plan might be something like this. In a week, I can get get 700 special-query element sets from OIG's new Web site. I would make seven text files, each containing a list of 100 objects (with some high-priority objects in every file) for a given day of the week, and then cut-and-paste a day's list into the OIG special-query form. Then I could e-mail the elsets to Mike or whomever -- or just put them on my Web site. Using Mike's files again as an example, leo.tle contains 1294 elsets, eccen.tle has 631, and geo.tle has 634, for a total of 2,559. Subtracting the ones now available in OIG's groups (visible, iridium, thirty, geo, etc.) should leave fewer than 2,000 objects. Four people getting 100 special-query element sets per day could get 2,800 "special" elsets in a week. So I think that working together we could surely come up with a way to get all the elsets we need, including getting the high-priority objects daily or more frequently. Perhaps we could form teams -- the "leo" team, the "eccen" team, the "geo" team -- of people with specific interests. In relation to all this, I'd be interested in a listing of what the main, most popular elset files are. I've been using mainly Mike's files for a couple of years, plus Rainer Kracht's "top 50", Jay Respler's "visual.txt", OIG's "visible" file, and Alan Pickup's "select.tle" and "iridiums.tle" more recently. I've been aware of others that I haven't been using, and this week I'm hearing about others of which I haven't even been aware. Ed Cannon -- ecannon@mail.utexas.edu -- Austin, Texas, USA