These were my comments to Don Baker. The test with a "full" 66-constellation was done later : Yesterday, a typing error made me start a 1700 day (4.5 year) long IridFlar prediction. When I returned to the computer a few minutes later and terminated, I had almost complete predictions for Ir8+7. I decided to keep them for statistical analysis. By another typing error, they were for latitude 57.22, not my own 59.22. Later, I picked six Iridiums from the five planes now at RAAN 106, 75, 42, 12 and 342 (two from the last, since there seems to be one plane still missing), and set the latitude to 49 N, and Sun Constraint to 6 degrees below horizon, and 365 days duration. In both runs I had the magnitude limit at 3.0, and Flare Angle at 6.0 degrees. I may write a program to tabulate and/or graph the distribution of flare counts over the months, the three MMAs, max.predicted magnitude, the orbit planes etc. Since the planes precess by 1.5 deg/day relative to the Sun, the five planes over a year, and the single one over 4.5 years, should cancel out, but the others, and the difference over latitudes could be interesting. I realize that you probably can't add any numbers to your article, but the totals might be interesting to know. Normalizing to one year*66 satellites, I get : At 49 deg.N latitude 1276 flares at night. At 57 deg.N latitude 1867 flares at night, 435 in twilight, 1500 daytime. In http://www2.plasma.mpe-garching.mpg.de/sat/seesat/Oct-1997/0357.html I wrote some comments on the frequency over latitudes. Using only the 1/cos(Lat) factor, 1276 would extrapolate to 1546 for 57 deg., 837 at the equator. But my second factor, caused by the orbit turning to W-E closer to the apex at 86N, and the larger effect of twilight visibility over the entire night for most of the Summer season at my latitudes, add considerably to the flare count. I would expect maxima somewhere between 60 and 80 degrees, N and S. -- --------------------------------------------------------------- -- bjorn@tt-tech.se (office) b_gimle@algonet.se (home) -- -- 59.2237N, 18.2286E, 44 m http://www.algonet.se/~b_gimle -- -- SeeSat-L / Visual Satellite Observer Home Page found at -- -- http://www.satellite.eu.org/satintro.html -- ---------------------------------------------------------------