Since finding the Iridiums and Heavens-Above back in January of 2000 or so, my wife and I have become addicted to spotting the flares (or the ISS / Shuttle, Mir, HST and other sats). And we've gotten several others interested as well. Particularly for the Iridium flares, I use a Casio PDA (E-115) that not only synchs time to the desktop and Internet time-servers, but it also runs "Pocket Universe" that lets me pinpoint the location of the flare with related star locations. I set the alarms for 5 minutes before to get outside and use to the darkness, then 1 minute before and then the actual time of the flare. Other than some of the extra Iridiums that don't flare, I don't think we've missed any that we've looked for. It's really great to be at a party and explain why everyone needs to go outside and see this happening! Find a good star chart program and check www.Heavens-above.com for your location. You can't miss. It's going to be a sad day when they start deorbiting. Dennis Jones north of Charlotte, NC ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Wed Oct 25 2000 - 00:14:00 PDT