[amsat-bb] AO-92 Camera Passes this week -- A big fat THANK YOU!!

[Zach Leffke]

Hello fellow AMSAT'ers,

I just wanted to send out a quick thanks to all for supporting the 
camera passes over the last couple days.  We did a demo here at VT on 
7/12 for a large group of Middle Schoolers and they were definitely 
wowed by the Camera images.  We were also able to monitor a bit of audio 
on the FM downlink as the satellite rose on Blacksburg, but before it 
was kicked into Camera Mode.  I was able to show them the footprint with 
our tracking program and explained how we wouldn't start to see images 
until the footprint crossed into Florida in order for Drew to kick the 
bird into camera mode. Before the pass I had them guess what kinds of 
things we might see, and they were pretty excited when they saw their 
guesses were pretty close (clouds, coastlines, ocean, etc........one kid 
was disappointed that there were no aliens...:-) ).

While we were able to get a good number of images direct in Blacksburg 
(including the shot of Cape Cod, Pic 86), it was very reassuring to know 
if I bungled the local station demo that I could jump to the website and 
show them images there collected from the community!  So many thanks to 
all out there for the backup.  And many thanks to Drew and the Ops Team 
for accommodating us with the Camera Mode request.  It felt really great 
showing kids visiting VT images from Space from a camera built at VT!


Overall great success!.....Made possible in no small part thanks to the 
entire AMSAT community.  So on behalf of VT....THANK YOU !!!!!



-Zach, KJ4QLP

-- 
Research Associate
Aerospace Systems Lab
Ted & Karyn Hume Center for National Security & Technology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Work Phone: 540-231-4174
Cell Phone: 540-808-6305