Early February 21 UTC (Wednesday evening local time) -- Wow! Sometimes you get some good luck, even under a first quarter Moon. The sky was super clear, and without binoculars and with horrible athletic field lights to my east, I was able to see 14 LEOs from the UT Austin campus. The notables were a really nice ISS pass, flashing Iridium 24 (97-082B, 25105), and three flashes (two extremely bright) from Orion 3 (99-024A, 25727). I was able to show Cosmos 389 Rk (70-113B, 04814) and TRMM (97-074A, 25063) to a passerby. While walking home, I saw a -3 (brighter than Jupiter at least) flare from UARS (91-063B, 21701), on a northbound pass low in the WNW -- for a total of 15 one-power LEOs. Later I was able to see eleven one-power flashes from ETS-6 (94-056A, 23230) from 4:08:40.6 to 4:10:13.0, while it was going south of Lepus. Unexpectedly, Intelsat 502 Rk (80-098B, 12445) passed through the field of view soon after the first ETS 6 episode had finished. Finally I found Yuri 3B (91-060A, 21668) a lot earlier than last night, so I wonder how long it flashes each night. At least one of the flashes, at 4:52:44.5, was visible without binoculars. I had to stop early because I needed to return to my office to finish something due in the early a.m. Airplanes. Recently I've seen an airplane with a 1.2-second flash period and another one with 1.5-second, as well as some with no strobes at all, but just steady lights. Last night I saw something which looked a lot like a northbound satellite going a couple of degrees above Regulus, but I was not sure that it was not an airplane with a steady white light. I didn't have binocs available. I didn't get any candidate using mccants.tle, leo.tle, eccen.tle, or select.tle. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Thu Feb 21 2002 - 05:46:02 EST