Ahhh...

Thanks. I was going to leav direct contact with the author until my other
avenues of investigation were closed as I only have a postal address for him
and in this day and age impatience would get the better of me!

Jeremy

"Martin Rowley" wrote in message
...

"Jeremy Handscomb" wrote in message
...
Thanks for all your help, Martin. What does APT mean and were you
being
serious?!


APT = automatic picture transmission; this is the system whereby you can
pull-down imagery as the satellite passes overhead your location; I'm
out of date on all this now (Bernard B. may be able to help), but as a
sproggy Assistant on a lonely island off Oman in the early '70's, we
used to have to go to a little hut at certain times and *manually* point
the aerial array at the NOAA satellites (and we tried for the Russian
Meteor's too), as they passed overhead. You had to work out the
horizon-azimuth, times etc from the NOAA-predicts., then point the array
and wait for the signal. The aerial was tracked as the spacecraft passed
overhead, and the image was downloaded line by line (the spacecraft had
a scanning mirror which acquired the earth-view at the sub-satellite
point), and read onto a facsimile recorder ... then you had to choose
the appropriate lat/long grid to trace on to the image etc.

All a bit of a black art, and I'm sure it's a lot more sophisticated
now!

Have you tried to contact Bill Pike? He may have the image you require.

Martin.