Alistair (afunge2 at hotmail.com) says...

I'm working on a theoretical model to estimate the magnitude of
iridium satellites before,during and after flares.

Randy John has his Iridium flare algorithm online:

http://home.comcast.net/~skysat/algo.txt

I'd love to talk to some people who have experience with
calculations of this kind.

I'm not one! But Rob Matson also has programs that calculate
Iridium flares.

The ultimate goal is to estimate magnitude of other satellites
during daytime (i.e. detect satellites during daytime).

Some ought to be, from time to time -- Hubble, ISS, NOAA, DMSP,
various large Earth-observing ones. Maybe GRACE. If you're
using computer-guided tracking of a telescope, you could see a
lot of them, probably.

Ed Cannon - - Austin, Texas, USA
(Remove "donotspam".)