Kevin Fetter wrote: > Tom , I think your visual pass yesterday was a high elevation one and I agree how big the station seems during these transits....in excess of 10" or so. The data is online at http://iss-transit.sourceforge.net/transits/matches-1p.txt - the distance was only 263 miles (in an orbit averaging about 242 miles in altitude) making the positioning somewhat critical (a maximum of 1.2 miles off the centerline, and realistically only about half of that), so for the solar panels, that works out to: 240 / (263 * 5280) * (arc seconds per radian = 206265) = 35.6" which is about 2% of the solar disk- or 0.1 inch (2.5 mm) on my projection. John Locker wrote: > Just as a follow up on this, I have prepared a rather crude image showing predicted and actual transit path and placed it beneath the August 29 details. Very nice- I modified it, adding a blue line to indicate my predicted path, which was about 0.6 miles southwest of the actual path (assuming that your position was 53.3875 N, 3.0917 W) and corresponding to a solar separation of about 0.08 degrees: http://iss-transit.sourceforge.net/scratchpad/s29Aug03.jpg It appears to me that the actual solar separation was about half of that. I use the WGS '72 (World Geodetic System) model, translated from Dr. T. S. Kelso's Pascal code; CalSKY uses WGS '84, which I believe is also the basis for GPS. I don't know how much of a difference this makes... but if there are any WGS '84 / Digital Elevation Model / Java experts out there that would like to join the ISS Transit team :-) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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