Long-timers know about this. For newcomers (if there are any anymore), in the next couple of months (exactly when depends on your latitude) there is the opportunity to observe much more easily than usual quite a few operational geostationary satellites. The following two messages contain more details and links to messages with even more details: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Feb-2004/0069.html http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Feb-2003/0461.html You don't even need predictions to see them. You just need to know the correct declination for your latitude; then you search that declination for objects standing still against the stars. But if you want to identify which ones you saw, you at least need "post-dictions". In terms of knowing where to look, I wonder if there are public listings of where operational geostationary satellites are located, their longitudes. If their longitude slots are in the public domain, maybe there could be a program that could convert the spatial coordinates "latitude zero, longitude x" into public domain TLEs, as the mean motion, eccentricity, inclination and drag are all pretty well known quantities for the great majority of the non-classified operational ones. So for those no one would need Space-Track.org elements -- maybe. (I'm wondering how significant the epoch would be. If they have almost no drag, almost zero inclination, almost zero eccentricity, wouldn't it work just to use "today" as the epoch? Continuing on speculating about producing public-domain elements. If someone were to get an accurate position on a object that might be an operational active (not a spare) Iridium and were to develop accurate TLEs for it, isn't it then possible to derive TLEs for all of the other 65 active ones, due to knowing that there are six evenly space planes with 11 of them per plane? It sure would be nice to have public domain elements for active Iridiums, so we could discuss them publicly, post flare predictions, etc. [Note to self -- I probably shouldn't speculate about orbital analysis, about which I know practically nothing, in front of the whole world....]) Weather forecast here -- next six or seven days, mostly cloudy with chances of rain. Seeing flaring geosats may be moot, if the weather doesn't improve. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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