Hi Dale, While your post may have been a little off-topic, it did remind me to look into the long-range possibilities of satellites passing through the moon's shadow that are visible from locations on earth in darkness. This is a way for some people who aren't under the eclipse path to indirectly "see" it. The favored geographic locations are those west of the eclipse-at-sunrise locations (west coast of South America and western South Pacific Ocean), and those east of the eclipse-at-sunset locations (Indian Ocean). I've never seen anyone chime in on Seesat-L from South America, and since these would be pre-dawn satellite events there, I didn't bother searching. For the Indian Ocean sunset, the nearest land that's in the direction of the eclipse track is the west coast of Australia -- unfortunately quite a ways away, meaning that only high altitude satellites, or satellites as low as 1500-km but low in the western sky (poor phase) can be seen experiencing eclipse. I went ahead and checked for satellites dipping in and out of the lunar penumbra/umbra as seen from Perth. Based on current elsets, the following satellites all experience at least 50% solar eclipses: UFO 10 Centaur R/B 1995-042A 1987-079S Cosmos 1981 R/B Cosmos 2105 Deb D Of these, the brightest prior to entering the moon's penumbra is UFO 10 R/B. From Perth it reaches magnitude +8.3, before dipping down to +9.2 (despite rising higher in the sky) and then reemerging at +6.9. Cosmos 2105 Deb D is closer to experiencing a full eclipse, but it is much dimmer, going from 11.4 to 14.7 and then back up to 9.3. As we get closer to eclipse date, perhaps other candidates will become possible. If I have time, I will also check a couple sites in southeast Asia. --Rob ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Fri May 11 2001 - 12:59:48 PDT