Rik Hill wrote:
> I wasn't being critical of Heavens-Above. It must be a huge task
> tracking all that and making sure all the orbital elements are
> in order each day. I guess underestimating is better than over.
Hi Rik,
I am also not being critical since they provide a real good service at a
very good price :-)
It may have something to do with the way they estimate or model
magnitude. As to better being under than over, I would rather have the
opposite but that is just personal taste. With the current de facto (under in
lieu of over), one could be missing opportunities which are otherwise
visible. I suppose it would also be frustrating if the converse were true and
one was rushing out to observe something which was supposedly visible but
really the converse was true as the false alarms would then turn people away.
I am especially sensitive to accurate magnitude estimates (for Iridium
flares) as they will impact whether I will pursue a photo opportunity or not.
Anthony.
>
>
> -Rik
>
> >
> > Join the club. This is something which I also have observed (excuse the
> > pun) with a trend by H-A to underestimate magnitude. I had yet another
> > example of this just the other night with an Iridium flare. To make
> > matters worse, a flare a few minutes later by another Iridium satellite
> > (-6.4 magnitude!) was completely missed by H-A but nicely picked up by
> > Rob Matson's IRIDFLAR. For the latter satellite, it was just coming out
> > of the earth's shadow but there certainly was lots of visible time
> > after that anyway to make it a definite reportable pass.
> >
> > At this point I simply use H-A to get a general picture of what may be
> > available and then proceed with Rob's SKYMAP and/or IRIDFLAR to confirm
> > and fine-tune.
> >
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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 18 2001 - 11:38:43 PDT