Re: Effects of Iridium orientat

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• Previous message: Skip Waisner: "Re: Launch Updates (Iridium, T4A, GPS NavStar)"

Thanks for your careful clarification.  I should be equally careful in saying
what I'm thinking.  I'm thinking about being able to predict daytime-visible
flares.  I'd like to make fairly reliable predictions, so I can grab novice
friends and say "look there then".  I've seen Venus during the day, but it
takes some doing.  Suppose we take a magnitude of -4 as a nominal daytime
limit.  The plot that Randy John makes available seems to say we need a "mirror
angle" (which one is that?) of no more than something like .4 or .5 degrees.
This is pretty close to the average crosstrack error you estimated (or twice
that, if it's the other angle).  Depending on whether the crosstrack error is
in the same or opposite general direction as the nominal "mirror angle", an
average crosstrack error will make the difference between being visible during
the daytime and not.  And if you take -5 as your magnitude limit (to make it
easier for novice friends to see), the tolerance is even tighter, making an
average crosstrack error even more likely to change a daytime-visible flare
into a daytime-invisible one.

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