G Becker wrote: > Quickly > > My name is Greg Becker. Currently a student at Washington State > University, although in about 6 months I will be Chemistry/Earth Science > teacher at the high school level. I am VERY NEW to this, in fact, with > the assistance of my SATspy program I managed to see nothing last > night. Hopefully, I can do a tad better than that. I plan to > incorporate some of these observations into an astronomy curriculum if I > can get it going. > > One question, can someone point me in the right direction as far as the > Iridium flare phenomena are concerned? Was wondering how many Iridium > sattelites there are, and how many are actually functional. Seems as > though half of them are spinning out of control or something. Thanks > for your time, hope to hear more of your observations soon. Greg, There are currently 66 Irdium sats in orbit. They are all in a low orbit (450 miles) and as far as I know they are all operational. As you may know the Iridium sats are a network of communication satellites used for paging and telephones. Check out http://www.iridium.com for tons of info on the iridium system. Jim H. > >