350 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 63 



right bad. And no matter what the methods, considerable difficulty 

 resulted in correlating the observations from all of the stations. 

 Again, the independence of the first observers proved to be both a boon 

 and a bane, and many of the problems that arose were not to be settled 

 until the first station chiefs' conference in June 1959. 



Certain operational hazards plagued the stations for many months. 

 Brief interruptions in tracking occurred in Iran because of cold 

 weather and mechanical troubles with the camera ; in Florida, Curasao, 

 and Japan, because the slave clock had to be overhauled; in India, 

 because of maladjustments of the film transport system. 



Each station had its unique problems. In a letter from South 

 Africa to Ken Drummond, Jim Knight neatly summed up several 

 of the pressures experienced in South Africa : "You should know that 

 the job here entails certain things beyond normal situations at noimal 

 stations. In addition to running the station, one must act as Moon- 

 watch coordinator for three teams in the Union of South Africa, and 

 now one in Rhodesia. On top of this, there is Dr. Hynek's observing 

 program at Radcliffe, probably a continuing one, and the additional 

 task of spending hours working on time propagation studies." 



And at every station there was the necessity for dealing tactfully, 

 constructively, and intelligently with the local people. In a sense, the 

 nine Baker-Nunn camera stations overseas might be thought of as 

 harbingers of the Peace Corps, and like that group they had both 

 their successes and their failures. 



The first months of the stations were all the more exciting and all 

 the more frustrating because the initial predictions from Cambridge 

 were not of the desired accuracy. The perturbations of a satellite 

 with a significantly low perigee are such that if it is not observed on 

 a regular schedule or if bad weather or poor twilight conditions inter- 

 fere for a few weeks, predictions of time may become uncertain by a 

 matter of minutes, and of the position of the orbital plane by a matter 

 of tens of miles. In this situation, the observer had to develop search 

 techniques, which might require a half hour of preparation, a half 

 hour of observing, and many hours of scaiming the films. 



For 1957 a 1, the observers tried all the observing techniques that 

 could be used with the Baker-Nunn camera. They kept the camera 

 motionless, so that the satellite image would appear as a trail; they 

 tracked the satellite so that the stars would form trails and the object 

 would be a pinpoint; and they used the oscillating technique that 

 allowed both modes. The last method was not used very much after 

 the first few months because the observers soon realized that they were 

 devoting a good deal of time and energy to obtaining results that 

 really were not needed, particularly for satellites of the brightness of 

 1957 Alpha and Beta. 



