Yeehaw! (That's southern USA talk for "Hurrah!") I have a witness! Mike saw it also. About half an hour before the pass predicted by the elements with mean motion of 2.58, some bad clouds started encroaching seriously on the sky at BCRC. After some consideration of the situation, Mike decided to drive farther west. I believe that we ended up roughly 10-12 miles (16-19 km) west of BCRC. Right on time (very close), here came a faint, slow-moving eastbound object. As it traveled on to the east, it brightened by more than a magnitude, maybe almost two. It may be tumbling very slowly. The following two provisional elsets both predicted this pass. It seems to me that the first one is somewhat closer to what was observed. Unk050702 2.58 1 89985U 05210.98940398 .00000311 00000-0 39425-2 0 06 2 89985 27.5425 185.6488 6884554 146.2772 218.9054 2.57968809 04 Ed050730 36 RMS=0.33 MM=2.57969620 31248 x 910 km 1 39690U 05697A 05211.07454544 .00000320 00000-0 18416-1 0 15 2 39690 27.5812 186.6520 6754611 139.1769 298.6535 2.57969620 371 Our location was -- well, I'm not exactly sure. I believe it was pretty near (within 8 km or 5 miles of) 30.35N, 98.06N. Here's a rough point: 2005/08/04 04:08:53 UTC; RA 20:38.7 Dec +13.3 At that moment I looked at my stopwatch, and then Mike said that it went into the Earth's shadow just about exactly on the WWV tick at 4:09:00 UTC. USA 102 (97-017B, 23031). What appeared to be this one was observed about 134 (+/- two) seconds early on this elset: USA 102 1 23031U 94017B 05117.11279909 0.00002700 00000-0 12170-3 0 08 2 23031 105.0370 64.7305 0015000 43.4657 316.5343 15.20888968 07 It sure can be spectacular, if one can only get a good chance to see it. Now, I hope that the weather will offer chances to see the Space Shuttle and ISS passes that will go over here. Best of luck to all trying to see (and photograph) them! Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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