Introduction

From: Fernando Mederos via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2017 14:05:04 -0300
Hello all,

     I am from Montevideo-Uruguay. I have been following the SeeSat List 
from some years and my main interest is on the technical side of the 
satellite observation hobby. I particularly enjoy developing 
enhancements to the capabilities of average enthusiast. I have got a 
background in Electrical Engineering and am a radio amateur with a bias 
toward satellites.

     Something I had fun with a couple of years back was extending a 
free Android app to enable following LEO sats with Celestron scopes 
without jumps (continuous motion). This app is useful for keeping the 
sat (i.e. ISS) very well centered in the FOV during a complete pass. 
Main trick is to introduce scope pointing corrections by sliding your 
thumb over the touchscreen of the phone without taking your sight from 
the camera monitor.

     Now I have recently setup a simple observation site based on Cees 
Bassa´s Sattools. Right now it is producing some data using a single 
fixed camera. The (very recently) assigned COSPAR Id. is 0899, some 
site´s details:

Camera: Samsung SDC435 with 50mm 1:1.4 Zoom lens adjusted at half it´s range
FOV: 20deg x 16deg
Mount: Fixed at Az40deg (0deg=South),  El30deg
Location: Lat-34.8961, Lon-56.1227, 30m above mean sea level.

     With aid from Cees Bassa I am working on extending Sattools package 
with the intention of making it a bit more user friendly and hopefully 
in the future also more autonomous. This is being done as a fork to 
Cees´s github repository. To date some few features have been added to 
try ease star field calibration, camera device switchover (multi-camera 
sites) and housekeeping (less command-line hassle).

     And of course I also humbly expect to contribute from now on with 
sat observations from this part of the world.

     Clear skies!

Fernando Mederos

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Received on Tue Oct 10 2017 - 12:06:05 UTC

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