On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 20:14:46 -0600, uncle arnie
wrote:

I was out at 56 degrees north, 103 W at about 7:30 pm local time, which is
about 3 hours after sunset. Laid out on a beach at -10C (+5 F) with the
waves tinkling the ice along the shore in the dark, with an ocassional
groan as the pack shifted into the beach. In the 40 mins of watching, I
saw 4 satellites tracking east to west and 2 going north to south. It'd be
interesting to have a database of these, so you could tell what you were
seeing. Maybe there's too much junk up there to sort out by time and earth
observation point.

http://www.heavens-above.com will generate information to
allow identification of viewable satellites pre- or post-observation.
Also google for mission planning software.

You might want to follow the
news:sci-astro-satellites.visual-observe group for further info on
identification resources. People often post questions of the form "I
saw something traveling direction between star1 and
connstellation2 on date at time. What might it have been?" In
many cases, the object is identified by other posters, with a
reference to the source of the information.