Dale asked: > Does anyone know the maximum visual magnitude of AO-40 at apogee. AMSAT OSCAR 40 1 26609U 00072B 01134.31089787 .00000009 00000-0 00000+0 0 735 2 26609 5.1930 193.9752 8146456 267.6333 8.8683 1.27005342 2473 Mike McCants' last RCS file has it with an RCS of 1.85 meter sq. His Xlate program yields apogee of 58985 km, perigee of 298 km -- an extremely eccentric orbit! I don't know how to calculate the theoretical magnitude from RCS and range, but it might be fairly visible at least with binoculars on good perigee passes -- for observers on the equator! There was SeeSat discussion about AO-40 last December: http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/Dec-2000/subject.html I would suggest that mentions of any object always include at least a catalog number (nnnnn) or a designation (YY-nnnAAA). I prefer cat. number but try to include both for all but the handful of most famous objects -- famous even to the general public. > Is there a current list somewhere of estimated magnitudes of > various satellites? Mike's programs Quicksat and Highfly each come with a magnitude file; there's some overlap, but the highfly.mag file is for objects with mean motion of 2 or less. In these files the intrinsic magnitudes are all based on visual observations. Quicksat.mag is available separately; highfly.mag is bundled with the prediction program. They are available on this page: http://users2.ev1.net/~mmccants/programs/ Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, 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 May 17 2001 - 02:00:30 PDT