Last night Mike McCants had predictions for a pair of objects to be quite close together and traveling in the same direction. One of them, Cosmos 2327 Rk (96-004B, 23774) was tumbling very nicely with a period of about 8.5 seconds. This seems to be significantly different from the online PPAS recent observations data, which are from 1999. Here's a PPAS format report: 96- 4 B 00-07-11 04:39:39 EC 161.4 0.5 19 8.50 Recently I've observed the ASTRO-D (or ASCA) Rk (93-011B, 22522) several times tumbling from about 4.0-4.5 to nearly invisible, but it's been so erratic that I have yet to be able to get a flash period for it. It has very quick minima, so I guess I'll have to try timing those next time I get a chance, even though they don't seem very regular either. The last object we observed, Iridium 920 (24871, 97-34C; formerly Iridium 20) was tumbling very rapidly, on the order of twice per second. However, Mike said in the telescope it was only hitting three out of four. It was pretty faint in binoculars. But it seems that it could be quite spectacular when conditions are right. 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://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jul 11 2000 - 02:34:05 PDT