It appears that around 12:00 UTC on 17 Dec, the ISS's orbit will coincide closely with the earth's terminator. That is, at about 12:23 UTC on 17 Dec, it will cross the equator southbound at local sunset & longitude 83.4 E, headed toward Perth, Australia, and south of Tasmania, and New Zealand. At about 12:46 UTC- which will be local midnight- it will reach the "bottom" of its orbit at latitude -51.78, longitude 166.7 (i.e., about 350 south of the southern tip of NZ) . It follows that around that date, ISS passes might routinely be seen in the Southern hemisphere before sunrise, and after sunset, and at latitudes lower than about 35 S (e.g., Melbourne, Tasmania, and the southern part of South America), you should be able to observe marathons (since it's near your summer solstice, and there won't be a lot hours between sunset and sunrise). Starting yesterday... just before the clouds moved in... and at least through Friday (according to my NASA "Satellite Pass Predictions" email alert), I'm having sunlit evening passes of both the ISS and Hubble (at about 35 N). I'll be rained out for the 70d ISS pass this evening... and tomorrow's pass is probably too close to sunset to be worth much... but it looks like I'll have a good chance for the 81d pass Friday :-) ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Dec 10 2003 - 13:54:13 EST