Just stumbled across this site, pretty cool, gives you good info for satellite spotting if you're a geek like me and dig astronomy. Saw a link on there about "Iridium flares". Iridium communication satellites that will line up perfectly with the sun at times and emit a flash in the sky. Never heard of that until now. Got one coming up in about 10 mins I should be able to see from my house, gonna try to catch it. http://www.heavens-above.com/
Was too low on the horizon for me. Trees blocked it. Yeah, the say in the FAQs you gotta be on point when it happens. Nice they give you a trajectory map that shows the route and exact time the flare occurs, down to the second. Looking like Lake Atlantic this weekend so gonna head up to Kerr lake do some wakeboarding instead. There's gonna be a couple that should be visible along with the ISS Sat night so gonna try to catch 'em. Hardly any light pollution up there too.
Sorry you missed it too. It seems like you need to look in the exact location and the flash is probably so small a quick that it's a "luck" thing to catch it. Satellites are always visible at night, you need patience and very low ambient light. Focus on areas and look for small, red, slow moving stars. Ha! The space junk that run our lives. Hey, thank for the heads up anyway, T Chic would have told us it was aliens or some ShI t!
Yeah and from what I was reading it will show the exact spot to get the max flare, the one last night was 28km west of me for the maximum brightness, but still should be able to see it if it was high enough. From the magnitudes it looks like it's pretty freaking bright if you catch it right though, up to -8 in some instances. Best time for viewing sats is dusk to midnight or 3am to sunrise. B\t 12 and 3am the sun is blocked so it's rare to see one. Some are pretty bright though, I've seen the ISS come over and it was bright enough to see even before the sun went down. Wife thought it was a plane at first it was so bright. Depends on the time\direction\arc etc. though. Pretty f'ing cool. Nice thing about that site is it will show you the visible ones for each day, how bright they are, and a map of the arc. Should be a really bright ISS pass this Sunday for my area, and almost at the zenith so a nice, long, bright pass to check out. Space junk indeed (thanks China!...dipsh!ts). I stumbled on a site one night that showed the paths of all the current active and inactive sats and junk in orbit. Was mind blowing how much stuff is up there. Quite welcome sir, glad you enjoy it. With Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn visible right now, it's good viewing every night. And of course it's aliens. I read it on the internet, Some fuzzy haired guy. Looks legit to me.
