These pages grew out of pages by Neil Clifford and Bart De Pontieu. From 1997 onwards Jeff Hunt took over managing and maintaining these pages until June 2002. The pages have been hosted at Oxford, UK; Garching, Germany; Palo Alto, CA, USA, and have now been moved to a private server in the satobs.org domain. They are currently "owned" by the collective that is SeeSat-L/VSOHP, as none of the originators are currently maintaining the pages. Here is some information from 1994-2000:
These web pages originally grew out of a collection of pages that I originally wrote as an exercise in producing HTML documents but also to provide some information concerning satellite observing. On several occasions I'd noticed people enquiring about spotting the space shuttle (and satellites in general) in several USENET newsgroups and, since I've been watching satellites for some time (and the shuttle since 1983), I made some predictions available via email for several missions in 1994. Gradually I translated this to WWW and collected various information on observing, observations and the satellites themselves. At the end of 1994 I started collaborating with Bart over the pages, so when they needed a new home it seemed natural for them to migrate in his direction.
When I saw Neil's pages at the UCL-site for the first time in November 1994, I thought they were great. I suggested some improvements, one of which was to include some pages about the two 'disciplines' of satellite observing (positional and flash period measurements). I had been involved in the Belgian Working Group Satellites since 1987 and we had prepared a few texts on those subjects, so I offered to write those pages. And then I was silent for 4 months, thinking it would be too much work for an html-newbie like me ... Until I realized in March 1995 that it would be easy to transform our newly finished English language brochure (on satellite observing) into html. When I discovered we had an http-server running all along, it seemed only natural to offer a new home for Neil's pages when he lost his server. At that time we also included the pages that I prepared about flash period observing.
It seems appropriate to acknowledge the help of several people here for their advice and contributions.