I left Houston Saturday for Mt. Etna and returned here Tuesday night. On Monday evening I sat atop an old crater remnant about 1km south of an eruptive fissure at Mt. Etna waiting for an Iridium flare to occur just above the top of the volcano itself. The sky had cleared and only a little smoke was emanating. Explosive eruption had ceased earlier in the day unfortunately. A long lava column was visible slowly inching its way down the slope at around 2000m altitude.You could hear the crackling of the lava (similar to sounds of pouring hot liquid into a glass of ice). Stars to +5 were visible. At the predicted time the +0 magnitude flare occurred and I was able to capture it as it disappeared behind the top of the volcano along with the lava flow in the foreground. I hope to post the photo in the next few weeks on my web site. There was a bit of luck in capturing this. I had attached a cable release to the 35mm camera but at one police roadblock the camera rolled onto the floor severing the cable inside the threaded part of the shutter release button. At the observing point reached by a 30 minut difficult climb, a 20-25 knot wind was blowing almost constantly and I had to anchor the tripod with a backpack and a camcorder to use as a weight. In order to secure the image, I had to manually depress the shutter for about 30 seconds while the wind was whipping the tripod and camera. The elevation of the flare was only 16 degrees above azimuth 349 and the flare barely cleared the top of the volcano. On the previous night I got stuck in a traffic jam in the town of Pedara and could not reach the volcano in time to spot a -6 magnitude flare. Though this particular flare was not all that bright, at this altitutde and with the sky clarity, it recorded extremely well. Paul Paul D. Maley Tel. 281.244.0208, Fax. 281.244.1140 Lat. 29.6049N, Lon. 95.1069W, Alt. 6m ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Fri Aug 10 2001 - 03:52:04 PDT