Tom Wyant

Late last year, I blogged about my plans for handling the Iridium flare functionality in the Astro-satpass distribution given that these satellites are being taken out of service in favor of a new design that does not flare.

For some time now, most of the updates to Astro-satpass have been to maintain the canned Iridium status table. This seemed wrong to me, so I have pulled Astro::Coord::ECI::TLE::Iridium out into its own distribution. This is currently available on CPAN. The first distribution of Astro-satpass without this module will be version 0.100, which should be out in a few days.

For people who use one of the CPAN clients, this should be a non-event. I know of no downstream packagers except for ActiveState and MacPorts. Last I looked, ActiveState was just automatically picking up all of CPAN (or not, as the case may be), though if there was no PPM package a CPAN client would work. I have filed a bug with MacPorts describing what is going on. We will see what happens.