A perfect night on our dark country site, but I left my stopwatch behind in Stockholm, so I just looked for extraordinary flashes, that I could time with my wristwatch, and memorize for a few minutes. SPOT 3 flashed to negative magnitude several times - the best two were probably 19:13:10 and 19:13:54 UTC 2000-08-25 (lap=44 s) at RA 19:24, dec. +18 and 19:06 +34 from predictions. USA 129 flashed to between mag.-2 and -5 too many times to count them, and memorize the times! With reasonable certainty these were the best: 19:26:27 0 20:43 +17 P 19:26:46 +19 s 20:48 +28.5 s 19:27:06 +20 20:57 +55 t 19:27:10 +4 21:00 +49 s 19:27:14 +4 21:03 +52.5 P 19:28:01 +47 05:59 +81.5 P 19:28:50 +49 07:57 +58 P I have not seen a pattern in the POSITIONS of previous flashes, but there seems to be a 24 sec period ( 25 sec on Aug.20 ) of primary flashes (P) with secondaries (s) 4 seconds before, and tertiaries (t) 8 seconds before. Since it has also been seen steady, this may represent the normal rate of reorientation/scanning rather than a rotation period. -- bjorn.gimle@tietotech.se (office) -- -- b_gimle@algonet.se (home) http://www.algonet.se/~b_gimle -- -- COSPAR 5919, MALMA, 59.2576 N, 18.6172 E, 23 m -- -- COSPAR 5918, HAMMARBY, 59.2985 N, 18.1045 E, 44 m -- -- SeeSat-L / Visual Satellite Observer Home Page found at -- -- http://www2.satellite.eu.org/satintro.html -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Sat Aug 26 2000 - 02:57:57 PDT