Re: Finding location for brightest Iridium flare
Robert Sheaffer (sheaffer@netcom.com)
Mon, 20 Oct 1997 08:05:04 -0700 (PDT)
Nick Budd
>
> One or two on this list have discussed how to find the location
> for the brighest flare of a particular Iridium pass, and have found
> that, in fact, just a few miles can make a large difference in magnitude.
> The idea is to enter different lat/longs into the programs and
> check the results. This is, of course, rather long-winded.
> I just wonder if the problem could be tackled by the existing authors
> (congrats to Rob Matson and Randy John on great programs).
> I really don't know what would be involved, but at the moment we enter,
> amongst other things, lat/long coordinates and get a predicted mag
> for each pass. Would it not be possible to enter a specific mag and
> get a resulting lat/long?
What would be helpful would be for each flare, to have it give you
the lat/long of the location where the sun angle reaches exactly zero.
That would enable us to decide where we wanted to go to observe it.
(Also need to store the TLE file name for IRIDFLAR!).
> The next logical step to that would be a
> range of mags, say anything brighter than -3, and come out with a list
> of coorinates that could be plotted on a surface map. I guess there might be
> a problem with different altitudes in hilly terrain areas but to a first
> approximation it would do the trick.
Elevation would be a 'second order factor', making relatively little
difference.
--
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