Re: Introduction

From: Greg Roberts via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 09:51:32 +0200
Welcome Alan to SeeSat - hope to see many more postings from you and 
hope that we can convert you into a serious positional observer :-))))

See you go back a longtime - as you say many of the Canadian Bulletin 
Board are still active today. Whilst I never dialed into it I did 
regularly receive the orbital elements and still have all of them stored 
somewhere.

Interesting about developing some satellite software.   Every serious 
observer has his own particular choices - I use QUICKSAT and HIGHFLY by 
Mike McCants for normal routine predicting as they are fast and usually 
accurate, whilst for monitoring whilst observing I use HEAVENSAT,  and 
finally for measuring etc I use GUIDE.

I would be interested in seeing your software and trying it out.

One thing I would like to see in software that I have not seen yet is 
the ability to display a satellite track against star background as a 
function of the error in the prediction - i.e if the satellite is 
expected to be say 10 minutes early then display this track as well as 
the predicted track - in fact it would be nice if the time offset could 
be something requested by the program whilst observing.    Sometimes 
with relatively narrow  field instruments one would like to be able to 
position the scope so as to get the satellite to pass near the center of 
the field of view.   One can do something similar using a plane scan but 
it would be far quicker to have the program display the predicted track 
for a given time offset and I am sure would increase the chances of 
seeing the satellite. Obviously one would like this software to be 
running in real term as many observers now are "monitor" observers.

Best wishes and hope to see a lot more from you
Greg
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Received on Fri Mar 06 2015 - 01:52:23 UTC

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