The Start

A new year and a new blog!

My name is Bruce MacDonald, I live with my wife Liz and our three children in Devizes in Wiltshire, UK. I have been involved in tracking satellites for just over two years now. I have long been interested in the subject though, for in 1982 I wrote to the Director of the BAA's Artificial Satellite Section (Howard Miles) for info on how to observe satellites. He sent me back a nice letter with some advice, but to my shame I never followed it up. Then, about four or five years ago I was doing a web search for an old friend of mine from school, Marcus Clark. Doing a Google for him I found he had posted to the Seesat-L list. I had recently become interested in astronomy again after a long period out of the hobby, so I started looking at the list at http://www.satobs.org and eventually joined. I soon found Heavens Above at http://www.heavens-above.com and began following the bright satellites. This was just before Mir decayed so I was able to see that famous space station still in orbit.

Eventually just watching them was no longer enough. I felt I needed to make positional observations of the satellites, in particular the US classified birds. Many of the posters to Seesat are veterans of tracking classified sats so there was no shortage of help from them and in November 2004 I made my first tentative observations. They were very poor but I stuck at it and the quality improved sufficiently to became useful to analysts, and I started posting my observations to Seesat. I also got my COSPAR number (2751) from Pierre Neirinck and since then I have been contributing my observations, mostly of the Lacrosse satellites but also some of the others such as the Keyhole sat USA 129 (96-072A, 24680).

I don't manage the output (or indeed the accuracy) of some of the Seesat observers but I do try when I can to make observations. It is not always easy as I have a full time job, and a wife and family to look after. But there is more to this hobby than just the obs; which is why I decided to start this blog for those cloudy nights. I will cover any related subject that takes my fancy such as equipment, past or future launches, my small collection of Soviet-era space badges, and other stuff.

For example, last night, 31 December 2005, there was a leap-second added to bring UTC back into sync with the Earth's rotation, which is gradually slowing down. I was at a friend's house celebrating. He has a clock controlled by a radio signal from DCF77 in Germany and as I watched the countdown to midnight, I saw the leap-second added with about ten seconds to go before midnight. The second-hand went backwards one tick before carrying on to strike midnight at the correct time. I think I was the only one to see this as everyone else was getting ready with the champagne and poppers!

Until next time....