Intro & questions

Mike_Spreitzer.PARC@xerox.com
Tue, 4 Nov 1997 11:08:29 PST 

My name is Mike Spreitzer, and I found this list when I got interested in the
question of whether I could see the satellite from which I get my TV (I'm a
DishNet subscriber).  I have a 1/3-meter Dobsonian, and an only modestly
light-polluted back yard (I live in Tracy, in California's central valley; on a
relatively good night, my unaided eye can see all but the dimmest star in the
little dipper).  I suspect it will be barely possible, if possible at all.  Any
opinions?  I'm in an astro club (http://www.hooked.net/~tvs/) that has a
17-inch Newtonian in a somewhat darker site.  I have Bester's SatTrack 3.1 (the
last free version), but it doesn't do SDP4; will I have a chance of locating a
dim geostationary sat with that?  I have Carina's Voyager II v2 for Macintosh,
but it doesn't do Earth satellites.  What I'd like is a prog that does SDP4 and
can print a star chart.

I've gotten interested in seeing Iridium flares.  I've gotten the latest
versions of SkySat and iridflar, and have seen one evening flare (I have less
time than I'd like for this stuff).  Let me add to the chorus of those asking
for a prediction service on the WWW.  Even better would be a notification
service that I could subscribe to.  I can put up a CGI service on the PARC web
server, if I have a CGI script that can run on SunOS 4.1.3.

While I can run predictions, it's a somewhat tedious process.  First, I have to
get fresh elements.  I have two choices: FTP and HTTP.  I'd rather not have to
do it by hand, but know how to automate only FTP fetches.  My workstations are
all UNIX boxes.  I don't have an HTTP fetch prog that I can invoke from `cron`;
do you?  (This is slightly embarrasing to ask, because I work in a project that
does distribute some HTTP code --- but it doesn't yet do proxies, which I need
to get through the Xerox firewall.)  Many FTP sources limit the number of
concurrent anonymous users, and I often run into that limit.  Do you know of
any FTP sources of elsets that don't limit anonymous users?

Once I get the elsets, I sometimes have to massage them.  For example,
Molczan's file comes with some extra junk at the beginning and end, but some
progs want only 3N lines.  Anybody got a prog that will fix this?  Really nice
would be a version of UNIX's `grep` that understands the structure of TLE files
and can produce not only filtered elsets but also, e.g., satlist_XXX files for
Bester's prog.

To run the Iridium prediction progs, which are both DOS progs, I also have to
manually transfer the TLE files onto my Wintel laptop.  And these progs are
built to be driven directly by users.

Please pardon the whining.  I know I could write progs to help much of the
above, but doubt I'll find the time to do so.


Mike Spreitzer
37.72N, 121.43W
spreitze@parc.xerox.com
http://www.parc.xerox.com/spreitze/