The answer to this may already be available on the Net but I often prefer to do some things the long way and would like feed back about my method here. The ground track of the ISS shown in Heavens-Above includes the area that can be seen from the ISS as it passes over your coordinate. I measured the radius of that circle and estimated its size in degrees of latitude. I then converted that to miles using a "distance between two points" calculator. This allowed me to determine that the northern and southern most horizons as seen from the ISS should be about 726 miles (1,168.38 km) farther toward the poles than the latitude 52 N or 52 S. I am rounding its orbital inclination to 52 degrees. Finally, I determined that they can never see anything N or S of about 63 degrees or so. Therefore no observer N or S of those latitudes will ever see the ISS come over the horizon. Will someone tell me if my estimates are correct? Thanks! Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 10 2006 - 18:16:58 EDT