On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Tom Wagner wrote: > Being quite ignorant of the geometry of these occurrences, can someone tell > me if there are times when one can expect the flare to be more gradual and > expect the satellite to move more slowly. Like, are the later ones more apt > to be this way? The darkness of the sky can certainly make a difference. On Jan. 05 I saw my first Iridium flare from a very dark sky. I was out in Big Bend Nat'l Park in W. Texas. After a peak of about +1 I watched Iridium 18 slowly fade, over what seemed to be a *very* long time, down to it's nominal brightness (+5-6 range). I was able to follow it until it went behind the mountains. In my usual +4 limiting mag skies I simply can't watch them fade for all that long. It was fun to see an Iridium satellite at its non-flare brightness with the naked eye. Robert Fenske, Jr. rfenske@swri.edu Sw |The Taming the C*sm*s series: Southwest Research Institute /R---\ | Signal Exploitation & Geolocation Div | I | |"The Martian canals were the San Antonio,Texas USA ph:210-522-3931 \----/ | Martians' last ditch effort." ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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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