This program has gradually evolved over many years. Its purpose has always been to support visual observations of satellites. For that reason, the normal execution of the program produces a single prediction for each satellite. That prediction point is the culmination point if that point is outside the Earth's shadow Otherwise, a point outside the Earth's shadow that is nearest the culmination point is chosen. The prediction of an object's magnitude is a primary goal. The probable error in time of prediction is computed by a heuristic. The observer's comments may be added to the 'intrinsic magnitudes' file for an object so that they will be printed with subsequent predictions. However, there is a "radio" predictions flag that will bypass all of the parts of the program having to do with magnitudes, the earth's shadow, RA and Dec The program is written in Fortran and uses the Microsoft Altmath Library This gives sufficient accuracy and the greatest possible speed for computers which do not have a math coprocessor. However, the use of this library means that a coprocessor will not be used even if it is available The program has certain 'built-in' limits: 1) No more than 1100 names and sizes may be read from the 'intrinsic' magnitudes file. 2) No more than 1000 element sets may be stored from the orbital elements files The program requires an IBM compatible computer. The program uses about 320K bytes of memory
