Re: Geostationary satellite flares at different latitudes

From: Björn Gimle via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2015 22:44:00 +0100
There are some tools available, but my quick reply is that the majority of
flaring occurs when the declination of the Sun is equal to the declination
of true geostationaries (the Clarke belt).
The location is just "on top/bottom of" or just outside east/west edges of
the Earth's shadow cone at their latitude, ie roughly opposite to the Sun's
RA. But the apparent position of the cone shifts from about 10 deg E of
this RA to about 10 deg W during a tropical night - less at other latitudes.
The position of the cone is shown in the excellent freeware "Stellarium".

There are some near-geos with a few degrees inclination, and some with
panels/reflectors in non-normal angles which deviate from this pattern.

My old website has a page with some text, and a spreadsheet for this
calculation:
http://www.algonet.se/~b_gimle/geoflare.htm


2015-03-01 21:09 GMT+01:00 Vladislav Gooba via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org
>:

> The vernal equinox is coming soon and geostationary satellites beginning
> to flare up. I have read that the mid-seasons of flares occurs at different
> times at different latitudes, as one time sunbeams "scanning" the southern
> hemisphere, and the second - the north. How can I determine when precisely
> occurs the mid-season of flares for, e.g., the 48th latitude?
>
> PS. Hello Seesat! My name is Vladislav Gooba (in some sites I'm known as
> 1valdis), I'm from Ukraine (usually I observing from E 35.0181, N 48.5265)
> and I'm 16 years old. It's the first time I wrote to Seesat. I was always
> interested in astronomy, but watch the sky I began a year ago. I and a
> several other good men translated Heavens-Above to Russian and Ukrainian
> languages. Now my setup is SW 114eq2 and Sky-Master 15x70. Some of my
> "achievements" is Yaogan 17 simultaneous triplet flare, many period
> definitions of failed Iridiums, disappearance trick of Lacrosse 5, nearby
> (-9)-(-10) mag. flash from ALOS, USA 229 deb 2 mag. flare. Hope that
> observing together with SeeSat will be interesting :) Sorry for my bad
> English.
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>



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Received on Tue Mar 03 2015 - 15:45:16 UTC

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