> Such a trip would certainly be worth the effort, but it's a formidable > job to calculate such an opportunity. It is possible to calculate the > "shadow" track of a satellite, i.e. the track on the ground connecting > all the locations from which the satellite would appear to cross the > Moon's disk. That would have to be done for all the Iridiums, and one > would also have to check all along the track if a flare occurs. > Not necessarily. If you are not prepared to travel more than a few hundred km, the problem is fairly linear. Just like the "shadow" track, the flare track is linear (and almost parallell). In 200 km, the Iridiums rotate less than two degrees, so the flares move at most four degrees in RA/dec. Moon's motion and its parallax are neglible. Just find any flare within a few degrees of the Moon, and run IridFlar for one location N and one S of yours. The flare positions off one Iridium plane move quite slowly from day to day. Taking a broader view, ignoring Earth topography and working in an Earth-fixed inertial coordinate system, the flares from one Iridium PLANE are essentially THREE parallell lines on the surface, and three lines on the celestial sphere! -- bjorn.gimle@tietotech.se (office) -- -- b_gimle@algonet.se (home) http://www.algonet.se/~b_gimle -- -- COSPAR 5919, MALMA, 59.2576 N, 18.6172 E, 23 m -- -- COSPAR 5918, HAMMARBY, 59.2985 N, 18.1045 E, 44 m -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jun 04 2001 - 03:47:46 PDT