After 4 hours work I finally found where that sputnik image is within the sky. I owe most of the credit to astrometry.net. Here is a link to the part of the image I used for the solve: http://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/5631#annotated Here is a shot of google maps with and without the photo superimposed on the star field. http://gr5.org/sputnik1.jpg http://gr5.org/sputnik2.jpg It was hard to get it to scale and rotate and fit just right. Something is distorted - probably the film or the reproduction process to get the image onto the magazine. The image turns out to be about 2 degrees the long axis (not 4 degrees as predicted). Also the image is not mirror image but as one would see it looking at the sky. North is down and to the left (you can see a N on a compass circle in upper right corner of pictures). If you switch quickly between the above 2 images you can see that all the stars line up. The path is extremely close to where Ted predicted it. Just eyeing it I'd say the path is 0.05 degree to the right of Ted's prediction (but maybe I'm in the wrong epoch). Still I had a heck of a time matching up this rich milky way region of the sky. As soon as the jiggling ends the path goes over a star at (according to google earth): 13h 42m 34.4s dec -65 15' 15" I don't know how to tell if it is epoch 2000 or some other epoch. Anyone know how to use google earth? - George Roberts http://gr5.org -----Original Message----- From: Ted Molczan Subject: RE: Seeking information from Spaceflight, Vol 1, No. 6, Jan 1958 [...] SAO Special Report 10 (March 1958), reported an observation from Mt. Stromlo on 1957 Oct 08 at 09:37:31 UTC, at RA 13:36:54, DEC -64:53. Epoch not reported. That position is close in time and track to several of my best preliminary solutions for the orbit of the rocket. The photo should be in the vicinity. [...] This preliminary TLE of the rocket should be within ~0.1 of track, and perhaps 5-10 s time: 1 70000U 57285.40716306 .00497834 00000-0 19181-2 0 01 2 70000 65.2501 317.6994 0482128 46.6160 317.4072 15.03056479 09 Ted _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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