Cool.  Bookmarked a Dartmouth page; will have to check it out.

Do you have a telescope?

Weird; just a few minutes ago I was thinking about (a) getting a telescope and (b) how cool the Iridium flash was. Unfortunately, the weather here is going to suck for a few days but it's totally awesome.

I was a neat small self-contained telescope the other day, but right now I'm going to hold off till I learn a little more. Trinity-Anne is totally into it, so it will be worth the while.

And another one this morning; it was almost directly overhead and not quite so bright as the first one I saw. I actually woke Trinity-Anne up for this one.

There was supposed to be a second one 10 minutes later, but for some reason we didn't see it. It was very bright out out (flare at: 7:33:07; sunrise at 7:44) and at 36° very low on the horizon, through some trees, and maybe even below a deck of clouds to the east.

There's too more this evening, though at SW and SE the view isn't very good. Tomorrow morning there's a -7 flare to the NNW at 69°, so I have high hopes!

I saw an Iridium Flare once and it was really spectacular. At first I didn't know what it was it looked really strange and I was pretty shocked by the experience. Later a friend of mine explained to me what it really was. Really interesting phenomenon.