Phillip, you must be in England, right. Another fellow just posted this observation of that trail on the HearSat list I quote it here Dale 1810z. It's a cold clear night here in the north of England, I've just watched the ISS going nearly straight overhead. When I saw it coming up on the western horizon I thought I'd picked up an aircraft banking - there looked to be a condensation trail behind it. But no, it was the ISS and there was a stunning trail of gas streaming out behind it to the West, looping sharply to the South in a U shape. I could see this with the naked eye, easily with binoculars. As it came up overhead I could distinguish two distinct trails, looking for all the world like aircraft con trails lit by moonlight, three or four degrees across. It put me in mind of the Apollo 13 movie, but unhurried Russian RT came up on 143.625 as usual. Did anyone else see this ? Chris Cadogan G3XWB -----Original Message----- From: Philip Masding [mailto:philip.masding@virgin.net] Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 1:27 PM To: SeeSat Subject: ISS and STS Hi everyone, Tonight Mike and succesfully videoed the STS and ISS as they passed over at about 1805UTC. As it came over the horizon I saw an approximately 1.5 degree vapour trail behind the two of them. This was through the LX200 10x50 finder which we use to initially acquire the ISS. The trail made the ISS look like a sort of comet. I was convinced we would never get an image of the STS because of the weather ( see below ) but with 2 minutes to go and the sky still clear I had to admit cloud was unlikely. Still the STS remained elusive since the angle of the Shuttle made it almost invisible. The ISS was clearly in a special flight mode for the reboost since my simulator predicted XVV and it was definitely not that. We will be processing our images over the weekend and hope to post them next week. We have had a bit of good luck with the weather in the last few days with the UK having cold, frosty, clear nights. So we have seen passes on the 9th, 10th and 12th. On the 11th fog intervened. Today the forecast was cloud moving up from the south and I looked at some BBC webcams which indeed showed it arriving in London at 0900 and then Oxford by 1000, extrapolating meant we stood no chance of still having clear skies by 1800 but later on the cloud slowed down and we made it. Phil ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Dec 12 2001 - 18:05:10 EST