At 14:21 5/03/06, Jeff Umbarger wrote: >Hey All, > With the declination of the sun between -10 and 0 >degrees declination for the next few weeks, would this >not mean that if we were monitoring the disk of the >sun, we would see geosats transiting the sun for the >northern hemisphere? At my latitude (+33.0 deg) the >geosats appear at around -5.25 deg declination and >that is where the sun will be next Tuesday. Has anyone >ever seen this before? That is, is worth watching for? Jeff, The problem is the extremely angular size of even the largest geosat solar panel span. A back of the envelope calculation says a 30meter span at 36 megameters is about a 1/4 arcsecond. so we are talking about a 20 inch telescope to resolve it theoretically. However the killer is the irradiance from the photosphere which will fill in any dark patch of airy disk size , let alone something much smaller. Tony Beresford ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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