On Wednesday 18 August 2010 02:26, Ted Molczan wrote: > Mike McCants advises that he has only seen long flares from MetOp A - > spanning a minute or so - not the few seconds that Dave observed. I just > checked Calsky.com's experimental MetOp A flare predictor, and it predicts > a flare on the pass in question, but much lower in the sky. I've seen quite a number of MetOp-A flares and they are very similar to Iridium flares. But magnitudes shouldn't exceed mag -5. Like bright Iridium flares the very bright part lasts just two or three seconds but you can see the building up and fading of the flare for up to half a minute or so. The main flaring surfaces of MetOp-A are the ASCAT antennas but using TLEs directly from Eumetsat for the epoch of observation (and being told that MetOp-A was in its nominal attitude at the respective time) there would not have been a bright flare from them. Around passage of the zenith MetOp-A should have shown a fairly steady mag 2 which would have been easily visible at a dark site. So my verdict is that it wasn't MetOp. Maybe a meteor coming straight down? Gerhard HOLTKAMP Darmstadt, Germany _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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