Hi Willie and List, > Regarding double Iridium flashes, I too since saw a double Iridium > flash which I cannot explain. I gave a satellite talk to about > 60 people last Saturday night from a very dark site and noticed > that we had a -2 mag flare from Iridium 65, scheduled about 20 > minutes into the talk. ... we even managed to pick up the > satellite long before it flared (did I say it was a good site?) > and followed it to the predicted flare point where it did its > thing. Just as the applause and the satellite started fading, > it almost immediately flared up again as it missed Alpha Cen > by 2 degrees (where was my camera?). Since I was trying > to keep my pose through all the cries of "why", I did not > make a mental note of the brightness of the 2nd flare but > it came close to the first, perhaps a little fainter. As has been suggested by Bjoern and others on the list, you saw a solar array flare from Iridium 65. It was predicted to be magnitude -3 by IRIDFLAR, 25 seconds after your regular flare from the right MMA. Solar array flare prediction was added (with a fair degree of programming effort!) in IRIDFLAR version 2.2 about a year ago. Surprisingly, few people seem to have made attempts to observe them, probably because most people use Heavens-Above for flare prediction. Best, Rob ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/sat/seesat/seesatindex.html
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