After several nights of looking for it without magnification and seeing nothing, last night Iridium 44 (97-077B, 25078) did a really good pass! Of the twelve maxima that I timed, nine were deep into negative magnitudes, a couple possibly -6. The first was about zero, and the last two were fainter, maybe +3. PPAS: 97- 77 B 02-01-14 01:21:02.6 EC 296.4 0.3 12 24.70 -5->inv awesome! As Iridium 44 was descending in the south, OAO 3 Rk (72-065B, 06155) crossed my one-power field of view with it, moving left-to-right at about +2.5. A couple of nice tumbling rockets, a CZ-3A (97-021B, 24799) and Intelsat 503 Rk (81-119B, 13007), PPAS: 97- 21 B 02-01-14 01:27:36 EC 110.2 0.5 26 4.24 +2.0->inv 81-119 B 02-01-14 01:58:27 EC 270.9 0.5 18 15.05 +3.5->inv asymm 2ndary Those were observed from BCRC, 30.315N, 97.866W, 280m. After getting back to my apartment, without magnification I was able to see nine flashes from Telstar 401 (93-077A, 22927), two or three of them seemingly comparable to Rigel in magnitude. A neighbor also saw two of them. I watched four more fainter ones with binoculars. The part of the episode that I saw was from about 3:23:05 to 3:51:07 Jan 14 UTC (last one about twelve minutes earlier than the previous night). There seems to be an alternating brighter-fainter pattern after the brightest ones, so that I did not see the next-to-last flash. PPAS: 93- 77 A 02-01-14 03:51:07 EC 1562.2 0.3 13 120.17 +0.5?->inv It was observed from my apartment: 30.309N, 97.728W, 150m. Weather permitting, I plan to start looking for it at about 3:00 UTC tonight (9:00 PM Monday January 14 USA time). Note regarding Gorizont 6 (82-103A, 13624) -- I may be mistaken about it flashing. After including it and seeing Tony Beresford's reply to that message, I searched for PPAS or other reports and did not find any. I believe that someone wrote to me once saying he thought he had seen it flashing, and so I've been getting predictions for it. But I don't believe I've ever seen it. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA (I really, really hate ashe juniper pollen!) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Mon Jan 14 2002 - 05:26:04 EST