thesis on tracking iridium satellites... measuring magnitude beforeand after flares

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

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

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

I'm working with some folks to develop a matlab model and will hopefully
implement some bi-directional reflectance distribution functions (BRDF)
for a variety of materials. Atmospheric attenuation via Modtran.

Thanks

Alistair
Dayton, OH

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".)

alistair wrote:

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

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

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

I'm working with some folks to develop a matlab model and will hopefully
implement some bi-directional reflectance distribution functions (BRDF)
for a variety of materials. Atmospheric attenuation via Modtran.

Thanks

Alistair
Dayton, OH

Ron Dantowitz has done lots of daytime tracking. His work has been
written up in Sky and Telescope.

Jay Respler


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