The main problem is that, without a high-speed camera a la Roland Stalder's 16 August '03 solar transit, it'll just be pot luck as to how close you can actually catch it to Saturn. Technically speaking, it appears that the angular diameter of the ISS will be greater than that of Saturn, so if you do get it, it'll be an occultation (or maybe an eclipse?) rather than a transit. ISS Transit is almost ready to go back on the air. My mother had a knee replacement just before Christmas, so most of the "spare time" I thought I'd have for program changes went up in smoke. Something I'd hoped to add- and may still get around to it- are ISS Jupiter & Saturn encounters. One thing I've implemented is ray-tracing through the atmosphere. Actually, it appears that such presumed precision only makes a difference of a few minutes of arc, even at an elevation angle as low as about 1.5 degrees (and essentially no difference at high elevations). And, likely as not, the imprecision in the TLE state vector is generally likely to be much greater than the precision added by carefully accounting for atmospheric refraction. I understand from Arnold Barmettler that he seems to be of the opinion that MCC TLEs aren't very reliable after a day or so (from my limited experience, I'd come to the opposite conclusion), so he only uses them for long-range predictions; instead using fresh OIG TLEs for near-term predictions. (Just today, I made a request to OIG for a "historic TLE" for the 16 August solar transit, to compare with my MCC TLE prediction.) I'd suggest that, if possible, you also set up a camera with a time-lapse exposure, so that it'll be possible to determine the prediction accuracy. Anyhow, go for it! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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