Hello Seesaters, Two nights ago I was attending a high school retreat that our students go to every year. Before the retreat, using MapBlast.com, I determined the precise latitude and longitude of the area in front of the building in which we spend much of the time after sunset. About a minute before a -4 iridium flare was to show itself in the east, a few teachers and myself left the building to hide envelopes for a scavenger hunt. Seconds before the flare I hollered, "Look up in the sky right over there. A satellite is going to shine a bright light down to the earth in just a few seconds." And so it did! The music teacher gleamed with interest and delight and wondered how I could have known that such a thing was going to happen! I want to thank Chris Peat for creating and maintaining Heavens-above and I want to thank many of the rest of you for introducing me to these types of observations. Even though modern methods have taken much of the challenge out of predicting such events, It's still fun and gives a rank amateur like me the opportunity to "look good" before those people that think it was because of some great skill and knowledge on my part that I am able to know when these things are going to happen. ;~) Clear skies and good flares, Tom science teacher Iowa USA P.S. I recently used a GPS instrument to determine the coordinates of my front yard. It matches well the coordinates provided by MapBlast. I also checked the altitude of a US geological survey marker within a few blocks of my place. The altitude readout from the GPS was within a foot of the value on the marker. Nice! The GPS receiver/transmitter cost less than $150.00 at Walmart. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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/sat/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Sep 20 2001 - 17:55:52 EDT