1 December 2007
- December
- From the Latin word for tenth since it was the tenth month of the Roman year.
| The icicles now fringe the trees
That swayed in summer's gentle breeeze. Dora Read Goodale |
I looked up the upcoming satellites again yesterday and in reviewing them I noticed that the Iridium flares get a little earlier every day. That got me to thinking about the geometry and I decided to try to chart out some of it to see if I could learn anything.
I realize that it is a combination of all of these factors and the chance that a satellite is where it is in its orbit at that time, and probably more factors of which I am not cognizant, that determine the brightness of any individual flare, and that a sample size of eight doesn’t nave much statistical relevance, but I wanted to do the analysis anyway.
| Date | Time Sunset + (minutes) | Mag. | Alt. | Az. Elongation | Satellite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1Dec07 | 1734 63 | -1.4 | 34.7 | 21.2 230.1 | 5 |
| 2Dec07 | 1728 57 | 0.6 | 32.1 | 18.7 231.5 | 8 |
| 3Dec07 | 1713 42 | -0.7 | 25.4 | 23.7 224.1 | 37 |
| 4Dec07 | 1708 38 | -2.1 | 23.4 | 22.1 224.8 | 34 |
| 5Dec07 | 1702 31 | -2.4 | 21.3 | 21.5 224.3 | 5 |
| 5Dec07 | 1715 45 | -1.6 | 66.7 | 47.4 200.4 | 51 |
| 6Dec07 | 1647 17 | 0.5 | 15.9 | 22.7 220.7 | 51 |
| 6Dec07 | 1656 26 | -0.6 | 19.6 | 19.7 225.1 | 8 |
I started out trying to make a bubble chart to plot magnitude against altitude and azimuth, but the bubbles were too big again and you couldn’t see anything on the chart. So I switched to an XY scatter chart and used a different series of points for different ranges of brightness. It seems like there might be a clustering of similar magnitude flares, but you have that one yellow, Mag -1.6 flare way off in the right corner that in brightness should be near the rest of the points. I am wondering if it is bad data that has that point way out there by itself.
Next I looked at magnitude and time from sunset. I don’t see any relationship there.
Be careful of this one. I moved magnitude to the abscissa because I thought the altitude should be on the vertical axis. I don’t see any relationship here either.
Lastly, I looked at magnitude and elongation. This isn’t true elongation since it only takes into account the difference in the azimuth of the sun and that of the flare, but it is close enough for government work. Again, no relationship is discerned.
Alone
From childhood's hour I have not been
Edgar Allan Poe |
Spots!
I just checked Space Weather and there is a cluster of two spots about half way across the lower left quadrant of the Sun. And here I sit without optics and the weather is supposed to get worse before it gets better. They saw we will have the coldest weather of the season, again, and there might even be a little snow, but it shouldn't amount to anything. But it is supposed to be cloudy at least through Tuesday so unless these spots are long lived it is unlikely that I will see them.
And Active Region Explorer has experienced a hardware malfunction and the site says there won't be any new maps for a few days. The last update to the site was on 14Nov07. It appears that the stand-alone version of the program still works.
NASA is planning to launch Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-122 this coming Thursday, 6Dec07, at 1431 EST. That will put it past NYC at around 1440 EST and too early for us to see it. There are visible ISS passes coming up so it is possible that we will have a chance to see Atlantis and the ISS flying in formation.
- Liftoff -3 days, 3Dec07
- Countdown begins
- Flight Day 1, 6Dec07
- Launch
- Flight Day 3, 8Dec07
- Rendezvous & Docking
- Flight Day 10, 15Dec07
- Undocking & Separation
- Flight Day 12, 17Dec07
- Landing
| 6Dec07 Mag -1.0 | Begins 18:01:47 | Alt. | 10° |
| Az. | W | ||
| Max. Alt. 18:04:23 | Alt. | 31° | |
| Az. | NNW | ||
| Ends 18:04:47 | Alt. | 30° | |
| Az. | N | ||
| 7Dec07 Mag. 0.2 | Begins 18:24:25 | Alt. | 10° |
| Az. | WNW | ||
| Max. Alt. 18:25:45 | Alt. | 16 | |
| Az. | NW | ||
| Ends 18:25:45 | Alt. | 16° | |
| Az. | NW | ||
| 8Dec07 Mag -1.1 | Begins 17:10:08 | Alt. | 10° |
| Az. | W | ||
| Max. Alt. 17:12:45 | Alt. | 33° | |
| Az. | NNW | ||
| Ends 17:15:20 | Alt. | 10° | |
| Az. | NE | ||
| 9Dec07 Mag -0.1 | Begins 17:32:39 | Alt. | 10° |
| Az. | WNW | ||
| Max. Alt. 17:34:40 | Alt. | 17° | |
| Az. | NNW | ||
| Ends 17:36:10 | Alt. | 12 | |
| Az. | NNE | ||
| 10Dec07 Mag. 0.3 | Begins 17:55:35 | Alt. | 10 |
| Az. | NNW | ||
| Max. Alt. 17:56:40 | Alt. | 12° | |
| Az. | N | ||
| Ends 17:56:56 | Alt. | 11 | |
| Az. | N |
The focus of the mission will be the installation of ESA's Columbus module which should go on the left at the bottom of the central, "vertical" elements of ISS. That is the habitable space. All of the transverse structure is there to support the solar arrays and for the attachment or external experiment packages.
NASA graphic
It must have been a slow day for science news yesterday. CNN has a soft news article on astronomy in general which mentions the upcoming Geminids meteor shower. The headline makes it sound like something unusual is going to happen.
posted by Charlie at 17:00
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