by CKR
There are now a bunch of people tracking satellites by eye and putting their results on the Web. I was there when it started.
When Sputnik went up in 1957, many eyes were raised to the sky to see that little light moving steadily over us. It was quite visible near dawn and dusk. One of my circle (a friend of a friend), Jane Shelby, thought it would be a good thing to figure out its orbit. She recruited a bunch of us to sit out in Sagamore Park and watch the sky. Many of us were amateur astronomers, or at least loved to watch the sky. And being able to be out at night with parental blessing was an added benefit. I should say that our ages clustered around junior high and early high school.
We giggled and joked, being that age, but for the most part we seriously took down our observations. Jane received a Westinghouse science prize for her work and a writeup in Scientific American. I didn’t recall that it was that close to when Sputnik went up, but it was cool and on school nights. Cool in all senses of that word.