The following reply has been sent to regarding the brightness of a 3 watt lamp Bob, your query about the apparent magnitude of a 3 watt lamp was reposted on the Seesat mailing list by one of the subscribers. As a Life member of Amsat I feel I should have a try, particularly as I dont contribute much these days. The illumination of your "radiator" is crudely about 5E-11 Lux, at a range of 800Km(500 miles). This assumes that the efficiency is 5 percent in converting to light. So one ends up with 0.15 watts of light which is about 100 lumens. I also assume this energy is spread out over a quarter of the possible solid angle of a sphere radius 800Km Since a magnitude zero star provided an illumination of 2.5E-6 Lux, The lamp would be 5E+4 fainter , or at about mag 12.8 Tony Beresford FRAS, FBIS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Apr 28 2001 - 23:02:19 PDT