Bruno: > I am not sure I understand what you mean. I felt uneasy about the wording of my last post but let it fly anyway. In fact, outside of drawing a picture this is a difficult concept for me to explain. >The real challenge is to see a dark satellite in front of the Moon. >This would be sometime in the middle of the night. As far as I >know, it has never been observed and it probably cannot be >observed except for large objects like ISS or the Shuttle. From what I have read from previous posts made to this group, one will not see, as you spoke of above, a "regular" satellite transit the moon (or the sun). They are too small and would be eliminated by the background brightness. However, I am sure that a person could see a spot of light, like that normally seen moving across most of the sky, if it crossed the side of the moon in shadow, even if it was just for a fraction of a second. I think it would be neat to try to plan to see such an event. It would look most interesting if a person could see the spot of light crossing a noticeably earthlit part of the moon. However, once the moon is past a certain number of days old, the dark part of the moon is indistinguishable from the background; so, there goes the esthetics! I agree that the odds of seeing a satellite crossing the moon at all, let alone the dark limb from any one location is remote, but I once raced 100 miles to line up a large weather balloon with the moon. I also traveled very far on three different occasions to photograph solar eclipses. Maybe it wouldn't be worth the effort to see a moon-satellite event. Meeting the challenge and pulling it off would be fun however---if I only knew how! Tom Iowa USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Thu Jun 07 2001 - 18:40:39 PDT