About Iridium Flares
Post here photos of Iridium flares.
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What an Iridium Flare is
Iridium is a satellite telephone service. Iridium satellites have three antennas which are pretty reflective and given the right conditions they can reflect a powerful Sun light beam toward the ground.
The satellites orbit is known very accurately so it is their position also, it is also known the exact position of Sun.
Given your position and some magical formulas you can predict when and where they passes over your head and if any Sun light is reflected by the antennas.
When those magical conditions meet you see a very bright star in the sky, appearing and vanishing out in mere seconds.
For comparison those reflections can be up to 30 times brighter than Venus!!! They can also cast shadows.
You need no Merlino power to predict Iridium flares, just point your web browser to Heaven-Above, enter your coordinates (at least 4 decimal digits) and click to Iridium flare prediction links.
You can find more infos on the net, here some reference:
www.satobs.org/iridium.html (EN)
www.paolobussola.com/iridium.html (IT) Broken link. Paolo's site is no longer avaiable
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