Morning Dale Interesting about Nova for Windows. I am aware of the program having tried it years ago but preferred other programs for my satellite tracking - where ever possible I avoid commercial software when its related to my hobbies. I also dont have an LX200 type scope so cant try it out. It will be interesting to hear from anyone who has actually used it to track satellites optically - this is after all the purpose of this discussion to try and find people who have actually tracked a satellite using available software. The support people at Starry Night apparently claim that their program WILL track on satellites but its needs a Mac computer - cant afford that luxury so again the question is "has anybody done this?" Im not an expert programmer but I agree with you re why is it so difficult to program a computer to do such? My CoSaTrak system can do this but its a "non-standard" system - ie not compatible with anything else as far as I am aware. It tracks on an ascii file of positions fed in externally but with modern computers it will be no trouble to do this inside the computer program. The computer could, whilst tracking, generate a short ephemeris, determine the dRA and dDec ( variation in RA/Dec over a short time span- second or less ?) and compute the "offsets" from the current position and set the tracking rates in RA and Dec for such a variation and then send the appropiate commands to the drive and track on the satellite. I dont know the innards of SATELLITE TRACKER but would imagine this is how it operates. In 1994 a commercial program called SATPRO was available - still is according to their web site - and this was used to partially control large astronomical telescopes to track/image SALYUT 7 etc http://www.comsoft-telescope.com/satpro-features.htm http://sol.as.arizona.edu/~dave/cbawest/sattrak.html Then Ron Danowitz acquired some fanatastic imagery of ISS etc more than a decade ago using some program to drive his telescope- so software probably does exist already - its a matter of finding it and somebody applying it in SeeSat. Cheers Greg _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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