Tuesday, two Iridium flares will be aimed at the Waldo Road shop

[Robert Munyer]

Tuesday, at 5:49 PM an Iridium flare will be aimed
very close, and at 7:26 PM another one will be aimed
extremely close, to the Waldo road shop. At this URL

http://www.heavens-above.com/IridiumFlares.aspx?lat=29.6808&lng=-82.2938&alt=50&tz=EST

, click the date-time stamp, scroll down to the local
area map, then click the "+" button half a dozen times,
to see where the center of the path is expected to be.

-- Robert

[Robert Munyer]

Someone who saw my previous message asked if it's surprising that you
can see a reflection from a satellite that's hundreds of miles away.
I'll answer here, just in case someone else might find it interesting.

Think of it this way:

Human night vision can detect a tiny number of photons, and the sun
provides a _huge_ number of photons (trillions of times more than you
get from the dimmest naked-eye stars), so a person on the night side of
the Earth who's looking at an object that's in full sunlight can easily
see a reflected beam, even if it's a billion times weaker than the
sunlight that a spacewalker next to the satellite would see.

I can see Polaris from the campus observatory, even though it's in a
badly light-polluted location near the Reitz Union. If the predictions
are correct, the 5:49 PM flare will be about 3,000 times brighter, and
the 7:26 PM flare will be about 4,000 times brighter, than Polaris.

(To do the math, raise Pogson's ratio (the fifth root of 100) to the
power of the difference between Polaris's apparent magnitude (2) and the
magnitude in the prediction (called "Brightness" on heavens-above.com).)

I expect it to look like when you see an airplane's landing light being
turned on, but more gradual. (But I've never been right at the center
of the beam path, so I might be wrong about how it will look.)

-- Robert

[Robert Munyer]

I wrote:

> I expect it to look like when you see an airplane's
> landing light being turned on, but more gradual.

Yes, that's what it looked like.

If we'd been looking in that direction at 6:35 PM, we would have seen
a fireball so big that it was reported by witnesses from Key West to
Jacksonville, and covered by newspapers and TV news:

https://www.amsmeteors.org/2017/12/fireball-caught-on-tape-over-florida/
https://www.google.com/search?q=florida+fireball

-- Robert