What Email reflectors/listservers are good for learning information about Earth satellite observing/operations?
A knowledge of how to visually locate the north star (Polaris) is generally a good skill to acquire, or as an alternative an inexpensive magnetic compass will suffice. From there, the directions of North, East, South, and West can be identified with respect to your surroundings. Also, your timepiece should be set to within 15 seconds of accurate time, which can be obtained from hyperlinks or telnet window to the time servers located on the main page. Most visible satellites cross the majority of the sky in less than 5 minutes. That does not hold true for all satellites, but is generally the case. The movement of a satellite across the sky is generally faster than transport aircraft and will not be leaving a contrail (frozen water vapour from combustion of fossil fuels). Aircraft can be positively identified by the display of flashing white strobes or red (left) and green (right) wingtip lights (required by law). On the other hand, an earth satellite can actively vary in brightness by t
