Let us assume that the shuttle was 50 miles up over California, and for simplicity's sake, that the earth is a sphere with a radius of 4000 miles.
Then, you could see the shuttle on your local horizon, barring obstructions of course, from a distance of about 630 miles.
The furthest simultaneous observer would be 630 miles exactly on the other side of the shuttle from you, for a maximum separation of 1260 miles.
Ergo, there would be a brief time, perhaps a minute or two, during which the shuttle would be between California and East Texas and be unobservable from the ground in either place.
This is all rough calculation on the back of an envelope (actually, the front of an HP-42S <)B^).
Thank you for the calculation.
So, somebody in, say, California could have seen the shuttle on their furtherest horizon and it could have actually been over another state, right?
This is all rough calculation on the back of an envelope
Your rough calculations are very accurate. This is an alert that I got the other day:
ASTRONOMY/SPACE ALERT FOR SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Brian Webb, KD6NRP Ventura County, California E-mail:
kd6nrp@earthlink.net Web Site:
http://home.earthlink.net/~kd6nrp
2003 January 30 (Thursday) 20:00 PST
SPACE SHUTTLE REENTRY VISIBLE
The Space Shuttle Columbia is set to land this Saturday morning at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Prior to landing, the spacecraft will reenter the Earth's atmosphere and become an artificial meteor.
During reentry, Columbia's groundtrack will pass north of San Francisco at 05:53 PST and continue east. The Shuttle will then pass immediately south of Lake Tahoe and cross southern Utah.
Because the Shuttle will cross northern California before sunrise and be at an extremely high altitude (above 220,000 feet), the reentry should be visible over a wide area. The event will theoretically be visible up to 575 miles north and south of the track. However, at this distance, the vehicle will attain a maximum elevation of 0 degrees.
In reality, the maximum distance the reentry will be visible is probably about 431 miles north or south of the groundtrack. This means observers across all of southern California have a chance to see it.
If you live in southern California and would like to see the reentry, my advice is to go to a very dark site with an unobstructed northern horizon. Then scan the horizon from the northwest to the northeast from 5:48 to 5:58 a.m.
For the best view, go north and try to get a close to the groundtrack as possible. Rick Baldridge has a map of the track and a plot of the spacecraft altitude versus distance-to-touchdown posted on the Web at:
http://photos.yahoo.com/rickbaldridge
Go to the area titled "Astronomy Stuff" and look for the files "__hr_Shuttle Reentry over Bay Area" and "__hr_STS Reentry Dist vs Altitude".
Regardless of where you observe the event from, try to bring along an observing partner. Locating a fleeting manmade meteor is a lot easier if you have another set of eyes scanning the sky.
Current Space Shuttle mission status is available at:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/status.html
If any of you end up seeing Saturday morning's reentry, please let me know.
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