Tuesday night just before midnight local time, while looking for one more flash from geosynch flasher ASC 1 (15994, 85-76C), I saw another object in the vicinity. It was moving northwards slowly, flashing to about +5.5 with a period of roughly 10.5 seconds. However, the flashes soon disappeared, and I assumed it entered the Earth's shadow. A check with alldat.tle did not yield any obvious candidates. Wednesday night just before midnight local time, Mike McCants and I both were scanning the same sky area with binoculars and saw a few flashes from a slow-moving northbound object, again about +5.5, period roughly 10.5 seconds. Again the flashes quickly faded to invisible. I just checked alldat.tle again, using data from both nights, and I don't get a good candidate. My data follow below. Sky positions are my estimates. (Mike no doubt has a better position estimate for April 6. In binoculars it was first seen about 2 degrees above alpha Sextans. On April 5 I first saw it about a degree or less west of alpha Sextans.) April 5 UTC; site - 30.3086N, 97.7279W, 150m Time: from 4:52:45.26 to 4:53:27.30 Sky position: from 10:00, 0.0 to 10:05, +1.0 (2000) April 6 UTC; site - 30.334N, 97.760W, 160m Time: from 4:49:58.47 to 4:50:40.86 Sky position: from 10:10, +1.0 to 10:15, +2.0 (2000) My April 6 obs. included a couple of secondary flashes about one second or less after the primaries, and there was one pair of secondaries, each one second or less. Earlier in the evening, Mike and I observed USA 129 (24680, 96-72A) to be fairly close to predicted position. Mike also observed USA 86 (22251, 92-83A) to be fairly close to prediction. For some reason I did not manage to find it this time. Earlier we also watched a flashing Molniya that I don't think I have seen before, Molniya 1-49 (12156, 81-009A). It seemed that we could have watched it for a long time. Its flash period is about 2.8 seconds, and many of the flashes were easy to see in binoculars, even with it at a range of 15,000 km. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Apr 06 2000 - 01:11:33 PDT