Hi All, I took a look at the pass geometry for the bright ISS glint that Ed Cannon observed: > Last night (about 0:53:30-0:55:30 Dec 30 UTC) I was watching what proved to > be a very bright ISS pass, very nearly as bright as Jupiter, when it flared briefly -- > about one or two seconds -- to brighter than Venus; then it dropped back > to -2.5 or so and then finally gradually faded as it went into the Earth's > shadow. <snip> Location was outside my apartment, 30.3086N, > 97.7279W, 150m. My program shows that the surface that caused this glint is very likely the same one that caused Ed Light's glint on 28 December. (The two LVLH vectors are only a couple degrees apart, perhaps less). It is a downward tilted surface on the starboard side of the station (right side if you are sitting on the station facing forward in the velocity vector direction). It is also slightly tilted aft. I still think the right Soyuz solar panel at the tail end of the station is a likely candidate. (Earlier I had mistakenly called this Progress -- thank you all for correcting me). Some have asked about the value of non-observations of glints. In the early stages of modeling, these are valuable because they lend support to the model if the model ALSO predicts no bright glint, and they indicate modeling assumption errors if a glint is predicted that does NOT occur. Dennis Jones' pass on 12/29 in Cornelius, NC, was also predicted to give a glint brightening around 18:21:05 EST -- in the vicinity of Cassiopeia as he indicated. (If the model is to be believed, Dennis's glint should not have been as bright as Ed's.) Cheers, Rob ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 02 2001 - 20:03:34 PST