Hi Guide users.

I came across an interesting pair of Geostationary satellites while waiting
for it to get dark today.
First of all you need to download the geo satellite two line elements from
NORAD. I use:

www.celestrak.com

But others are equally as good.

Set the date for 2000 Mar 17, 04:05 CST(5:05 EST)
In the settings menu set TLE=geo.tle, or whatever you called that set of
geo elements.
In the display menu turn on satellites and turn everything else off
In the Goto menu select satellites and enter 97027A
Go to level 8 or higher and right click on the yellow triangle representing
97027A
Open up the animation menu and click on animation dialog.
Set the time step to one hour and lock on Horizon
Start the animation running and you will notice that there are two
satellites in the area, one is 97027A and the other is 97059A. They seem
to meet at 4:05CST(5:05 EST).

I have tried this for several locations other than my own in Wisconsin,
namely Bill Gray in Maine, Jim Roe in Oaxaca, Mexico and Richard Kowalski
in Florida. There is some parallax, but very little as these two satellites
are only about 20 miles apart in their orbits. Watch the motions of each
for a few hours of animation time.

Each satellite is eclipsed by the Earth's shadow from 21:49 to 22:58 CST
and the display turns to red for that period.

Have fun.

Bob Elliott
750 Fall Creek, WI