Hello all, Just a quick intro and bio. I am from Vanderhoof BC Canada, 54N, 124W. I have been a computer GP since about 1986. I provide network and IT management services to our local region. http://www.aspenhouse.ca. As a teenager I used to sit on the roof of our house with a pair a binocs and scan the night sky. I own a 8" Coulter Optical dob and a half dozen pairs of binoculars. Most of my observing now happens in front of a computer screen. A few of my favourite sites are http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html, http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html, http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/ as well as the news pages at Astronomy.com and SkyandTelescope.com. When I do go out and visually observe it is usually with the binoculars. Back in the early 1990's I got interested in visual satellite observing. This was pre-Internet and the main source of information was the Canadian Space Society BBS in Toronto. I used to dial up at 300 baud and download tle files and such. It is neat to see that a lot of the names that were on that board are still active on this list. Hello again. One of the things that fascinated me about satellite observing was that it was dynamic. You could predict what was going to be up there with a computer and then look up with the aid of your binocs and see something moving across the sky. This led me to take Paul Hirose's SeeSat software and wrap it with a DOS based graphical interface that projected it against a starry background. I had a lot of fun with that and spent many an evening freezing my butt while glancing through the window at a computer monitor and then at the sky. A few months ago I got that old software working in a DOS emulator and started thinking that it could be re-written for windows. I looked around for something similar but really couldn't find anything. Most seems to be oriented towards ground tracks and predictions. In the last couple of months I have been tinkering away at a new version. The SGP4 code comes from http://www.projectpluto.com/sat_code.htm <http://www.projectpluto.com/sat_code.htm>. The original routines were written by Dr. T. S. Kelso (though he wasn't credited with it in the source). I've managed to get that into a working DLL. Some of the code for sun elevation, observer to sat alt/azm, ra/dec and such are Paul's code translated into VB.NET. The user interface and routines that read the McCants and Molczan visual info and star data are written in VB.NET using Visual Studio 2013. I've managed to get into the stage where it saw first light a couple of evenings ago. I was pleased to spot a couple of mag 4 NEOs on time and more or less where they should have been. I intend to release it under the GNU license. I would welcome alpha testers and it would be a bonus to have co-developers. Any feedback as to what features the casual to serious observer would like to have (I'm in the former category) would be appreciated. I hope it will be useful. Clear skies, Alan Madill http://www.wiseoldcat.com/?q=node/12 _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Thu Mar 05 2015 - 23:00:29 UTC
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