For my secondary interest, asteroidal star occultations, I got a tip on the mailing list I use for another prediction site, where I found a Java tool to measure your reaction time, "personal equation", for a one-time event: http://www.popastro.com/sections/occ/occdir/occpetest.htm For our common hobby, there can be applications for flash timings. Perhaps not the regular ones, but there are exceptions: 1. When you make positional obs of a satellite only ssen at short flashes. 2. If you time "all" flashes, without first getting a feeling for the regular period, you can estimate the error in the first few timings. 3. If there are spurious secondary flashes and you want to get accurate offsets from primary maxima. 4. When observers in different locations see the same pass, accurate timings can determine the direction of rotation, and if there are one, two or more flashes per rotation. This has been done with Superbird A, I believe. My own results surprised me - they were very consistent, but longer than expected (0.50s), and the reapperance of the star was timed only slightly later (0.55s) than the disappearance. /Björn ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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