IridiumFlares is an application that predicts the flares produced by the constellation of communication satellites known as Iridium. A flare can be observed when a light source (such as the sun or the moon) is reflected by one of the satellite’s antennas. A flare is a very bright phenomenon (the brightest have a magnitude of about -8.4) that can easily be observed if the date and location in the sky are known. This phenomenon generally occurs at least once a day, the morning before sun set or the evening after dawn. Some flares can be visible during the day. The duration of a flare is approximately from 3 to 8 seconds, therefore an application that predicts the exact date is required to have a maximum chance to correctly observe the phenomenon.
IridiumFlares is free and open source. It has been written in the portable language Java (version 1.4). It requires a Java virtual machine (>= 1.4) and the Java3d package.
IridiumFlares will run on any platform that can run at least the Java virtual machine version 1.4. This includes :
Windows 98, Millenium
Windows NT 4, 2000, XP and 2003 server
The Java virtual machine can be downloaded from here : http://java.sun.com/j2se/latest/download.jsp
The IridiumFlares project is hosted at SourceForge.net :
You can contact me about IridiumFlares at :