Greetings, After a bumpy start of hits and misses, it looks like Don Pettit on the ISS is nailing the Iridium flares with regularity now. The past three days he has seen four flares each day. His photography is also getting better. Now that he has a sense of the flare timing, he can hit the shutter of his Nikon digital, factor in the exposure delay, and catch the full familar tapered brightening and fading of the flare while framing it with the station's solar panels. Rob Matson has been supplying SkyMap generated .gifs of the star field along with the Earth landmasses below so Don can zero in more accurately on the flashes. Bear in mind the view out the station's windows is often restricted by how the station is oriented, the sky can be blocked by the solar planels and other external equipment, and often the flares are invisible because of sunlight reflecting off station surfaces blinds Don to the view of the night sky. I must say that I have been thrilled to be able to act as go-between to forward Rob's predictions up to the station. This has been a completely amateur project with Rob creating the prediction program on his own and Don Pettit looking for the flares on his own. This is the closest that I will ever get to actively being involved in space flight and it has been a blast! Robert Reeves reeves10@swbell.net 520 Rittiman Rd. www.robertreeves.com San Antonio, Texas 78209 210-828-9036 USA 29.484 98.440 200 meters ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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