Plane Spotting

[kinetic (Steve)]

A bit of fun while on holidays over Easter.
A regular check of Flightradar24.com showed a daily flyover
of a Cathay Pacific heavy over Broken Hill at the same time of
day.
Shown here climbing out of Melbourne (1st pic) it is 27,000ft but climbs to
between 37,000 and 40,000 once it reached Broken Hill as a waypoint
to Hong Kong.
With the budget webcam and the ED80 on Scooter, I hand tracked it
while it was exactly overhead and picked out a few clear frames.
Callsign verified it as B-HLQ

Steve

[adman (Adam)]

fantastic shots - scooter mount strikes again!

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

Well nabbed!
You'll be wanting a focal reducer next.

[astroron (Ron)]

Great work Steve
Cheers

[Dennis]

Nice work Steve – it is a pity that you cannot download the flight path into your hand controller for a GoTo!

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman (Mike)]

Very cool. The ISS is next!

[sheeny (Al)]

Well done Steve!

I'm with Mike... ISS next please.

Great bit of recycling, the scooter mount!

Al.

[hotspur (Chris)]

Great work,well done-I've done similar with my son.we used a alt-az mount I pushed the scope while watching through finder,while my son had a digital camera in a bracket viewing into a T 6 13 mm nagalar,on a really clear cold winter day and with a bit of luck we got some good images.

Reading Dennis's post,while it was a passing comment,with all the technology about these days,its not a big ask to be able to make Dennis's suggestion work,obviously it would'nt be avaliable to the general public.My Vixen Skysensor has feature that the orbital elements can be down loaded of a satilite and it can be tracked in the eye piece.So could the same be done with flight plans and waypoints.

Anyhow here is an image that may be of interest-Chris

PS the plane is very high up

[OICURMT]

Downloading the flight path would not work, as the plane does not *exactly* follow the *exact* same path everytime, as compared to the FOV for an eyepiece such that you could fill the plane in the photo...

BUT........

You can automate the tracking process without downloading the flight path....

http://www.optictracker.com/Home.html

Originally Posted by Features

Optic Tracker is designed to direct your telescope to automatically acquire and track any visible object, no matter it’s a helicopter dropping water on a wild fire, a jetliner cruising at high altitude or the International Space Station passing over head in the vacuum of outer space. You only need 4 buttons on the joystick to track a target. 2 to select what you want to track from the live telescope image, one to start tracking and one to stop tracking.

http://www.youtube.com/v/gkuHPkbnOOo&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0


Tried to get it to work on my computer (Windows7) over Christmas to no avail (could never get setup to recognize my Celestron). I'll try again sometime soon (hopefully). If anyone else gives this a try, let me know how it goes please.

OIC!

BTW: Only works with Celestron and Meade Scopes (as far as I can tell).

[ChrisM]

Nice work Steve; and good shot Chris.

I've tried to track hot-air candle balloons (at about 5 km range) by hand on the M8 but it's not easy with a polar mount. The optic tracker sounds interesting.

Chris