A few evenings ago I was looking without binoculars for a bright Long March and saw a couple of bright flashes that turned out to be from Midas 9 (02481, 66-089A). Earlier tonight there was another pass at a range of over 2,300 miles (3,680 km). It did a series of +1 magnitude flashes, at RA 19:27 to 19:22, Dec +30 to +18; the time was about 3:19:20 to 3:21:30 August 28 UTC. I forgot to take my stopwatch (first time in years) and don't know if the flashes were regular (which they were not the other evening), but they were roughly 15 to 30 seconds apart. Some were sharp double flashes. This and the other night were both from BCRC: 30.315N, 97.866W, 280m. Usually Midases are a good test for me of a good evening. If I can see one near the zenith from the BCRC site with 8x42 binoculars, the weather is very nice -- and no moonlight. But sometimes they are very surprising. In looking for an image of this satellite, I found that it's called Midas 12 or "RTS-1 3" on Gunter Krebs' web site. In a SeeSat-L message it was called "Midas RTS-1 F3". http://satobs.org/seesat/Sep-2001/0246.html In the same search for an image I found an academic site that has images of many satellites on postage stamps: http://www.cira.colostate.edu/ramm/hillger/satellites.htm Lost satellite? I wonder what happened to Cosmos 2217 (22189, 92-069A)? The last elset is from day 182 of this year. (It was just an accident that I noticed that it's lacking recent elements.) I guess that SCC lost it.... 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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