Re: ISS-STS obs.

• Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]
• Next message: Mike DiMuzio: "ISS Reboost"
• Previous message: Daniel Deak: "ISS-STS obs."

 dan.deak@sympatico.ca wrote:

>I watched a pass of the Shuttle docked to the ISS for 3 minutes...
>Instead of appearing
>as a small dot, the ISS-STS duo appeared elongated.

	I saw the "pair" pass from southeastern New Brunswick a few hundred
km ESE of Daniel on the previous pass at 09:41 UT (don't worry Daniel, it's
only my second sighting as it is mighty early in the morning for us!)  I
would suspect the elongation you saw was either and effect of your optics,
the low elevation pass or the light haze.  At 29 degrees altitude,
ISS/shuttle would be about 700km in range, and would be in the 10 arcsecond
order in angular width (that's about 34 meter wide object at that distance
- not the exact dimensions of object, but within order of magnitude).  This
angle would represent about 1/2000 of the field of view of your binoculars.
It's easy to split dim double stars of this seperation with a decent scope,
but the bright and fast moving shuttle with binoculars, REALLY hard for the
optomist!
	Hope you (and I) get some good views of it Thursday and Saturday
mornings!
cheers,
-t

Tyler MacKenzie  MTX
Sackville, N.B., Canada
45.885 -64.368  +15m   Z-0400

• Next message: Mike DiMuzio: "ISS Reboost"
• Previous message: Daniel Deak: "ISS-STS obs."