This question is more about the moon than satellites. You can only see a "completely dark moon" either from space (because the new moon is too close to the sun to see) or during a lunar eclipse (although most people wouldn't say it is completely dark even then). You can certainly see a lit satellite cross the dark portion of a thin crescent. But not during a lunar eclipse. To see a lit satellite cross a lunar eclipse it would have to be just after sunset or before sunrise (so that the orbit above you is lit by the sun) except that as the satellite heads away from the sun and towards the moon it would enter the earth's shadow before it could cross in front of the moon. You might be able to get a dark red satellite crossing the dark red moon but this would be almost impossible to see. Just as hard as seeing a lit satellite cross the full moon. - George Roberts http://gr5.org -----Original Message----- From: Giuseppe N. Gerbore Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2011 9:07 AM To: seesat-l@satobs.org Subject: LEO crossing new Moon Is it possible for a lit satellite to be spotted crossing a completely dark Moon? At first thought no, but what about during an eclipse, with observer located on the border of visibility area? Giuseppe -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/private/seesat-l/attachments/20110119/c7927526/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 19 2011 - 14:33:15 UTC