near midday meant that the initial orbit began as a descending (southbound) leg during daylight, all later descending legs did likewise and all ascending (northbound) legs occurred during darkness. At U.S. imaging latitudes, those ascending legs proceeded along paths at azimuths between 018° T and 022° T, more northerly than north-northeasterly, becoming slightly more easterly within that region as each path went to higher north or south latitudes. The azimuths of the descending (southbound) legs during imaging times were similar between 162° T and 158° T. Unlike its downward-looking photo-satellite cousins, Quill looked northeasterly during descending legs and northwesterly during ascending ones. Flight path Quill's first descending path crossed South America and reached its farthest south near Antarctica below the middle of the South Atlantic. The following ascent skirted Africa's east coast, then crossed Pakistan and the western tip of China near Alma Ata in the Soviet Union. Subsequent ascents followed paths of similar shape, but each one was “set over” to the west from the previous one by the amount of earth rotation in one orbital period plus a small amount of westerly orbit precession, for a total of 22.5°. Thus the second non-imaging ascent passed over the Caspian Sea, the third over western Turkey, the fourth near northern Italy's border with France, and the fifth over Ireland. The seventh ascent, the first one west of the Atlantic, went over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and the eighth was the first to reach the U.S. Midwestern states, where the initial imaging event took place. Sets of descending (southbound) paths at U.S. imaging latitudes occurred first over Pacific Ocean areas west of California and first occurred over eastern parts of the U.S. nearly a day later. After a substantial interval, a new set of northbound and then one of the southbound paths over the U.S. occurred, there being four such sets in four successive days, two of them then crossing previous ascending paths. The last onboard recording of data on film occurred during the descending leg of the 30th revolution. That film was ejected and recovered over the Pacific Ocean during the descending portion of the 33rd orbit, after which only down-linked data were available. The final ground swath was imaged in the 72nd orbit, during which imaging ceased because the chemical battery providing system power became too discharged for continued payload operation. The longest (orbit 30) image swath stretched about