On Sat, 15 Jun 2002, Matson, Robert wrote: > As has been suggested by Bjoern and others on the list, you saw > a solar array flare from Iridium 65. It was predicted to be > magnitude -3 by IRIDFLAR, 25 seconds after your regular flare > from the right MMA. Solar array flare prediction was added (with > a fair degree of programming effort!) in IRIDFLAR version 2.2 > about a year ago. Surprisingly, few people seem to have made > attempts to observe them, probably because most people use > Heavens-Above for flare prediction. Thanks Bjorn, Rob and others for the nice explanation for what we saw. I must admit, I am one of the lazy ones relying on heavens-above for Iridium flare predictions, particularly when dealing with the public since I know that the non-performer-Iridiums are filtered out beforehand for me. I thus have not really used IRIDFLARE for predictions, only for some after-the-event analysis. From my recent experience, I'm surely going to change my plan of attack now. Going after solar array flares are well worth the effort from what I saw. Does IRIDFLAR give an indication of the "certainty" of a particular prediction or do one need to remember which are the non-performer Iridiums? Thanks again Willie ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/sat/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jun 25 2002 - 20:50:33 EDT