Hi All, After nearly a year of searching, hampered by coastal clouds, periodic moonlight, work schedule, and on and on, I finally recovered USA 39 (1989-046A, #20046) Monday night (April 10 local, April 11 UT) using 8 x 56 binocs under clear, but slightly moon-polluted skies. Last April, Mike McCants and I lost it sometime between April 6th and April 18th. (Mike saw it the 6th; neither of us could find it the 18th). After doing some snooping around the LANL site, I knew that 1989-046A started moving west on April 9th. By the 11th it had already moved about 5 degrees in longitude, explaining why neither of us could find it. The satellite's flashes are not visible for long each night in binoculars -- I only saw the +7 mag flashes intermittently for about 3 minutes, though I may have missed the beginning. I was only able to record one solid reference point, and a second less accurate one. The following search orbit should be sufficient to acquire the satellite for the next several days (from California, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and western Texas). I have not calculated correct checksums -- I just used the ones from a prior elset. The inclination is an extrapolation based on solar-lunar effects after one year. I have not changed the eccentricity, argument of perigee or mean anomaly from last year's elset -- I've simply changed the epoch and RAAN to match my observation, and changed the mean motion to get a stable satellite longitude. USA 39 1 20066U 00102.10150000 .00000000 00000-0 00000+0 0 01 2 20066 5.0040 55.5000 0080000 225.1993 150.0035 1.00272000 09 I had hoped to refine the orbit with observations Tuesday night, but coastal clouds intervened at the critical time. Flashes Monday night were visible from 22:20 - 22:23 PDT (or 11 April 5:20 - 5:23 UT). No flashes were visible Tuesday night from 21:35 - 22:10 PDT (12 April 4:35 - 5:10) -- limiting magnitude about +7.8. If the clouds had held off another 15 minutes, I think I would have seen it. Hopefully someone with darker skies, a telescope, or both can pick this up soon so that a better TLE can be posted. Cheers, Rob ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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