On Sun, 5 Mar 2006, satcom wrote: > Tried to figure this out a couple of years ago Jeff.....and came to the same > conclusion as Tony. > The objects would be too small to resolve. The Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (currently in the final stages of getting aproved) will be able to do this. It is a 1 meter class telescope with adaptive optics. There are some smaller solar telescopes equiped with AO out there that might just detect a transit. Of course they do not take whole-disk observations. Fields of view are a few arcminutes so it'll take a bit of luck to be observing a feature when a sat goes by although with the population density of some parts of the clarke belt it will surely happen. Another big if is: will an unsuspecting scientist realize what the strange linear feature is. A bad row on the ccd no doubt... Somehow I don't think this will get very high on the list of science priorities:-) > I have manged to see transits of leo craft down to 2 arcseconds with an 8 > inch scope , but 0.25 arcseconds , even with a much larger aperture would > be near impossible....the target being lost in the "noise". > > I did wonder at one stage if it might just be feasible using a large > telescope and a projection of the Sun's disk onto a large screen. > ... For several months I was on the lookout for ISS transits at the sites of the GONG network. (This is a program with 6 observing sites around the world making 'continuous' observations of oscillations of the sun's photosphere) Within a week of signing up with Tom's alert service there was one at our India site but it was during monsoon when that instrument was offline. A couple of others at low elevation after the instruments had shut down for the day. Others would show up as alerts 8-10 days in advance but as the date of the transit drew near the ground track always seemed to recede from the observing site. Never bagged a single one! When you're tied to a fixed location, or even 6 fixed locations, ISS transits are fairly rare. Say, whatever happened to Tom Fly's ISS transit alert anyway? Richard Clark rclark@lpl.arizona.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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