Hi Willie and List, > Thanks Bjorn, Rob and others for the nice explanation for what we saw. > I must admit, I am one of the lazy ones relying on heavens-above for > Iridium flare predictions, particularly when dealing with the public > since I know that the non-performer-Iridiums are filtered out > beforehand for me. For the general public, I agree that Heavens-Above is the best choice. It's easy to use and does not require the user to download software or orbital elements. > I thus have not really used IRIDFLARE for predictions, only for > some after-the-event analysis. From my recent experience, I'm > surely going to change my plan of attack now. Going after solar > array flares are well worth the effort from what I saw. I'll warn you that solar array predictions are not as reliable as those for the MMAs since solar array pointing is not nearly as critical to spacecraft operations. So you'll see a larger range of visual magnitude error in those predictions -- some brighter, some dimmer. > Does IRIDFLAR give an indication of the "certainty" of a particular > prediction or do one need to remember which are the non-performer > Iridiums? If you download your Iridium TLEs from Mike McCants' website, the name line for each Iridium contains a status flag. Tumbling sats are tagged with "t", and spares (at lower altitude than the operational constellation) are tagged with "?". IRIDFLAR will do predictions for the ? sats, which generally do flare as predicted. It skips predictions for the (many) tumbling sats. The one-character status flag does appear in IRIDFLAR's output, so you'll know which ones are questionable. 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jun 25 2002 - 20:50:33 EDT