Ken (kgirodias@yahoo.com) wrote: > Tonight 3/27, I saw two flares from the Iridium 13 satellite. > The first one was at about 19:54 .... I would guess it was > about -1. The second flare was about a minute later but not > as bright .... These flares were not predicted by > heavens-above for this area. Using the Heavens-Above coordinates for Cary, NC, Iridflar predicts a flare about +1 at about 19:54:10 with the center line about 32 miles west of Cary. I can't find it right now, but I think that the H-A Iridium flare magnitude cut-off is zero magnitude. The reliability of Iridium flare magnitude predictions is very sensitive to how close you are to the center line (especially in the east-west direction). If you're five miles east or west of that line, the predicted magnitudes can be way off. For Iridium flares it's recommended to get your location as close as you can. You can go to a site like this one (USA only): http://www.geocode.com/eagle.html-ssi put in your street address, and it will give you very precise coordinates -- which will give you the best possible Iridium flare predictions. If you are able to run one of the available DOS prediction programs, you can get predictions for "flares" as faint as you want! Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Wed Mar 28 2001 - 01:44:39 PST