In the last several nights, NOSS 2-3 (23908, 23862, 23936; 96-029C,D,E) have been peculiar in that on every pass, even on both passes in one evening, the trailer and outlier have been at least a couple of magnitudes brighter than the leader. Last night even with the moonlight, I was able without magnification to see the trailer and outlier over much of their pass, so they must have been about +3.5 at least. But the leader required binoculars and even then was fairly faint. These are southbound evening passes, which seem to me to be the most likely passes during which to look for one-power brightness from NOSS 2-1, 2-2, and 2-3. (It may be that northbound morning passes are similar, but I don't do much morning observing.) Last night's NOSS 2-3 interrupted my Intelsat 512 obs, so that I missed a few of the flashes of the second half of the episode. I saw it between about 3:57:49 and 4:09:35 (July 29) UTC. Using my last-flash times, I'm seeing it about 12.5 minutes later each night. For the next two or three nights, central and western USA observers who like flashing geosynchs might try to see both Gorizont 16 and Raduga 21 in one field of view. Especially Monday evening (from Austin at least) they will be close together in the sky. Gorizont 16 is now about every 95.75 seconds, and Raduga 21 has varying-length segments from 33 to 88 seconds totalling about 238.6 seconds, possibly divisible into two half-periods. 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 : Sun Jul 29 2001 - 15:22:23 PDT