Mark A. Hanning-Lee wrote: > Last night 4/18 PDT between clouds I saw 23502 Cosmos 2306 r, on time > according to the elset in mccants.tle. Close to mag 1.5, brighter than > the predicted mag 3.3. > > That just reminds me that it's always worth looking at rocket > bodies in > case they have a good orientation on this pass and shine a few mag > brighter than predicted from the average orientation! A review of Russell Eberst's observations back to Oct'98 (35 points) confirms the frequent large discrepancy between predicted and observed magnitudes. I obtained a mean std magnitude of 5.0, near the bright end of the range typical of this class of object, as derived by Rainer Kracht from a large sample of Russell's observations: http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/Dec-1995/0109.html Over the 35 points I analyzed, based on a std magnitude of 5.0, the observed variation was about +/- 1 magnitude. Consistent with this, the pass observed by Mark would have been predicted to reach magnitude 2.4, but was observed to reach magnitude 1.5. Ted Molczan ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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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