Last night I showed to iridium flares to a large group of people during the annual star party at a local provincial park. The fist was a nice bright -5 one, the crowd really enjoyed that one:) The ? means not at operational altitude, attitude may not be reliable. If the attitude of the satellite is off, then the predictions will be off. Think of attitude as the way the satellite is pointed. If the mean mission antenna's which cause the flares are pointed off from the angles that the program uses to calculate the brightness of the flare then the flare won't be as bright as if the antenna is at the correct angles. It's possible even for iridium satellites listed as operational , do be off in the attitude, so the observed magnitude is fainter the predicted maghnitude. I have seen that twice alreay with two different one's. Then there is one, that I didn't even see flare. If the satellite had been at the right attitude at the time, it would have been a nice -8 flare. But it attitude was off, so no flare :( The operational ones have a mean motion of close to 14.3421 Rob's program will compute flares from non operational orbit one's, not like heavens above it appears. So use rob's program, and wait. If the satellite has a good attitude, the you never know until you see the flare, or someone else has reported seeing one from the non operational oribt one's. Kevin _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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