Hi Kevin and list, > I use rob's skymap program to find lunar transits, then have to go through > each one to find one that is sunlit. That's because right now skymap, > doesn't use the lighting menu to compute transits. You've mentioned this to me before in private e-mails, but I figured you would soon discover you were mistaken. SkyMap *does* pay attention to the satellite lighting constraint for lunar transits. You can prove this to yourself: go into the lighting constraints menu and set F1 and F2 to No constraint, and F3 to Night Only. Do a 2-hour search from say 6pm to 8pm for January 27th. (Set the transit tolerance high enough that you get at least 5 or more tracks). Then go back into the Lighting Constraints menu and change F1 (the satellite lighting constraint) to Sunlit only. Then rerun your plot. Many (and perhaps all) of your tracks will disappear, because most will not be sunlit. I do agree that SkyMap does not pay attention to the ground site lighting constraints when doing transit searches. I figured no one would intentionally do a lunar transit search during a time window that spanned daylight, so it was an unnecessary waste of CPU time to compute the lighting condition at the ground site. Perhaps with today's fast computers, people don't care if it runs a few seconds slower, and I can put the check in there. I realize that SKY64.NEW (or SKY65.NEW if you're a beta tester) says under the mods from 5.0 to 5.1 that SkyMap doesn't use the lighting constraints when doing transit searches. At that time, it didn't. In version 6.3, the functionality was changed so that the satellite lighting constraint IS used for lunar transits. While this fact isn't explicitly stated in the update notes for mods from 6.2 to 6.3, it is implied by the remarks about satellite visual magnitude and blue tracks for satellites that aren't sunlit. To avoid future confusion, I've modified the update notes in the 5.0 to 5.1 section to say that the *ground* lighting constraints are ignored rather than all lighting constraints. Best wishes, 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 : Wed Jan 24 2001 - 12:50:31 PST