Hi folks, I am new to this list. Satellite observing is not a hobby of mine, tho I have gone out to see this ISS a few times and such. I have never seen an Iridium flare; never looked for one, tho I am looking now. What prompted this post was this news item on CNN a few weeks ago: www.cnn.com/2002/US/02/20/pilot.rocket/index.html which supposedly is a report of a suspected model rocket fired at an airliner. Model and amateur rocketry -is- my hobby, and many folks in it were concerned with this report. We have plenty of government regulation as it is, and don't need an incident such as this to stir things up further. There are many reasons for us to believe that this could not have been a model or amateur rocket, but its hard to convince those that are not familiar with the hobby. It occurred to me just today that this might have been an Iridium Flare. The incident was on 17 Feb, 7:10 PM EST, reported as 12 miles SE of the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, while flying at 3000 feet. Using some online maps, I came up with that location as approximately -76.442, 39.082, and used that in the heavens-above flare predictor. It resulted in a flare at: 19:05:51 EST, magnitude -5, altitude 23 degrees, azimuth 317 degrees, from Iridium 31. I also found that the flare track would be ascending, headed from WNW to N. If the aircraft were headed NW towards the airport (I don't have those details of the report), the flare would have been directly in front of him. I figure the time reported in the article might have been the time the report was made, so it matches pretty well. So, its my thought, that to the pilot, the flare might have looked like a small rocket exhaust nearby. Is this plausible? I would value any opinions. Thanks in advance, Gary Crowell ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 06 2002 - 17:04:56 EST