Computer Controlled Pointing

Pointing manually as I do is NOT the best solution but it means that you do not need a computer controller. If you have a Meade computer drive and the Autostar software - this is a start at getting them to work.

First you get Autostar ready to track satellites as well as astronomical objects.

Let's Get Autostar Loaded With The Right Satellites

To see what a computer driven mount can do, use the latest version of Autostar. Once you use Sky At A Glance to see which satellites are going to be visible, select those satellites in the Autostar software and then transfer them to the hand controller - this section gives some basic directions for that.

Set up your telescope and use the alignment procedure; we manually point the telescope at Polaris and let it go through the alignment.

You can use a standard PC laptop and the Autostar Update dialog box to retrieve a star chart and satellite orbital data. Autostar refers to this as the ephemeris? Autostar comes ready to capture this data but you have to know which buttons to click on. The owner's manual, which is copyright 2004, is pretty pathetic.

This dialog box is what you are looking for - with a list of satellites in the left hand side and a smaller list (that will later be transferred to the hand controller) in the right hand side. You see this after clicking "Satellites" in the box on the left.

It helps to NOT select many of the available satellites, these are going to be very difficult to see for various reasons - see below.

Like many Windows programs, Autostar comes with pull down menus, buttons, sliders, etc etc etc scattered throughout the dialog box - with little consistency.

The dialog box above shows what we are looking for - the explanation following tells you how to get to this point. We will come back to this dialog box in a moment. For now, click on Satellites in both sides.

This shows you a large number of objects - obtained from the US Air Force, you see the satellite common name, satellite "catalog" number, and "international designator" on the left hand side of this dialog box. Their Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC) and the 18th Space Control Squadron maintain the default world's satellite catalog - they assign satellite numbers, assign "international designators" etc. This list comes from the CelesTrak site (I'll try to add some explanations of that later).

We need to get this list and the satellite orbital parameters into the database of objects, to get this list we use the "Get Object Data from WWW" option under the File pull down menu.

Here you are offered lists of satellites to copy, you do NOT need them all. You do NOT want "Iridium 33 Debris" since those objects are too small and the orbits are too uncertain for you to track them. In fact you do not want any Debris at all and you do NOT want Breeze-M R/B Breakup. You probably want Space Stations even though most objects in that list are not space stations at all - but it does give you the ISS.

Select "100 (or so) Brightest" and some other lists and click OK to get the orbital parameters downloaded into your database of objects. The dialog box will now look like the first time the dialog box was shown, above, with a large list on the left hand side. You will populate the right hand side (see below).

Look through the list of objects in the left hand side of the dialog box and click on some bright ones, use the -> button (in the middle) to transfer the object over to the right hand side of the dialog box. When you have a good list of objects, use the Connect button (on the top right in the Autostar Commands area) to connect to the hand held controller and use the Send option to send the objects to the controller.

I am going to add the steps to get the "classified" list of satellites into Autostar, that was not difficult once we knew how to do it! With the classified list you can track some of the more interesting satellites.

Once you have the needed satellites in the handheld controller, select one tell it to to point the telescope towards the point where you want to observe the satellite. Yes I am working to add more detail to this step!