For a couple of nights I got some peculiar flash times. The first night I thought they were possibly Gorizont 14 and Raduga 21 commingled, as they were very close to the same position. The second night again I got odd flash times, but Gorizont 14 should have moved on to the west. I asked Mike McCants about these, and last night he put his telescope on Raduga 21 (18631, 87-100A) and found that it alone was the source of these times. Here's a sample that I got last night using his telescope: ...... 88.85, 32.06, 47.83, 37.63 32.63, 88.31, 32.00, 47.60, 38.24 32.63, 88.36, 31.36, 48.28, 37.87 One reason there's some inexactness in the values is because some of the maxima last four to six seconds! It's fairly low in the west from Austin. The flash episode here seems to gradually end or at least diminish greatly before 5:00 UTC; not sure when it starts. Not sure when it would flash for observers to the west of here. I was seeing some flashes in 10x50 binoculars, including last night, but I believe that to get all of the above segments requires a telescope. Its mean motion is pretty close to geosynchronous, so it's not moving much at all in longitude from night to night. If I remember correctly, the first I heard of this one flashing was from Steve LaLumondiere sometime last year. 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 : Wed Jul 25 2001 - 16:40:03 PDT