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Monday 2 February 2009 by Emmanuel ZURMELY
Version 1.3 released on 2009-02-02. Download | Launch

Iridium flares prediction software

What is IridiumFlares ?

Saturday 4 December 2004 by Emmanuel ZURMELY

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
-  Linux
-  Unix
-  MacOS

The Java virtual machine can be downloaded from here :

The IridiumFlares project is hosted at :

You can contact me about IridiumFlares at :

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