Quote:
Originally Posted by nolany36
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I usually use the USNO site, but this one is a bit easier to use. Quickly gives the time of day for true south (ie the
Solar Noon answer), and also will tell you when at least your true south sat will have solar outages. Ie when the solar declination equals the declination of a satellite to your south (which is what the Saduon calculator does), then you can expect solar outages for your true south sat, AND, for site survey purposes, the position of the sun in the sky will be pretty close to the Clarke belt (ie as mentioned in recent thread, this usually occurs about 10 days or so after the autumn and spring equinoxes). The declination of a sat near the eastern or western horizon is generally about 0.6 degrees less than a sat to your south, so the sun is in the Clarke belt (and you'll get outages) a bit sooner (in the fall, later in the spring) for sats near the horizons than it is for sats to your south.
So there is a good bit of info you can get from this calculator.
Thanks.
EDIT: Note... you can save this page to your computer and run it locally, rather than needing to be on the web.
EDIT 2: Also, at the bottom, there is a link to solar position calculator, ie
NOAA Solar Position Calculator .
This will give az/el values that you can compare to the AZ/EL data for each sat that you'd get from the Saduon fixed dish calculator.