At 19:59 24/04/01 , Brad Kostelny wrote: >Hey all: > >I appreciate your feedback concerning Mars Odyssey R/B 1. I went out this >morning armed with a good near-zenith plot, and I took a look at a >star-chart overlay showing the booster flying close to Vega. I just came in >from this observation and saw nothing. Either the elsats I am using or >wrong, or the booster is to darn dim to see. However, if the estimate of >mag. ~3 holds, I should be able to see it. I tracked Cosmos 1689 R/B this >morning in a beautiful horizon-to-horizon pass, and H-A listed this booster >as mag 3.8 .. so Mars Odyssey R/B should be an easy object. =) Brad, Alan Pickup has assigned a standard mag of 5.5 for this object in his select listings. I assume he used observations of other recent delta second stages. Looking at the pass you tried near 6 am your time this morning via H-A, and the sun was only 10.8deg below horizon, the range was 1600Km and I would think the phase angle was near 90. So the brightness would have been about mag 6.5, not easy to see in a fairly bright sky. Tony Beresford ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Tue Apr 24 2001 - 06:45:31 PDT