Last night in mediocre, partly cloudy conditions from the middle of town, I saw what I'm fairly certain were flashes from Intelsat 512 (16101, 85-087A). They were +4, easy to see in 10x50 binocs. Thanks to Björn Gimle for suggesting when to look -- it seems to have been a right-on suggestion. The flashes I saw were just before 3:00 July 24 UTC. If I understand correctly, Björn says that it flashes later east of Texas and earlier west of Texas, and its flashes are about 15 minutes later each night. It's fairly similar to Superbird A, in that it flashes brightly but only for a few minutes each night. The flash period was about 26.9 seconds, which seems to be half periods relative to previous apparitions. Orion 3's (25727, 99-024A) first pass, with the bright flashes, will be in fairly bright twilight here tonight. Maybe people east of here will see it? After two nights of great one-power passes of USA 102 (23031, 94-017B), when it looked very much like a tumbling Iridium, last night I failed to see it! 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 24 2001 - 03:28:14 PDT