After the third try, I was finally able to see Feng Yun 1D Rk (27432). It was flashing from invisible to about +5 when I acquired it in Bootes. As it moved to Ursa Major, it was supposed to dim, but instead the flashes increased in brightness to +4 to +3. This probably occured because the satellite's azimuth was approaching that of the azimuth of where the Sun set. I recorded approximately 90 flashes (I was hoping for 100). Approximately once every 10 flashes or so, one flash seemed to not appear. Near the end of the pass, as the flashes began to dim once again as 27432 went towards the north sky, a lot of flashes seemed to not appear. So I stopped where I thought I saw my last flash (~ 90) and I stopped my stopwatch. For about 90 flashes, I accumulated 160.17 seconds. I rounded that to 160 seconds. That comes out to a period of 1.778 seconds, +/- 0.1 seconds. Considering that the satellite had a reported (by either Mike McCants or Ed Cannon) flash period of 1.6 seconds on 10 July, which is pretty accurate, considering that I haven't timed a flashing satellite for at least a year, probably more. It certainly is a lot of fun timing flashers! More than an hour later, I tried to see the NOSS 2-1 trio. They did not show up, but it was hazy and they were predicted at +7.4 anyway. While looking for them in vain, I serendipitously sighted the Resurs 1-4 Rk (25400), which was predicted to be at +3.6. There was no perceptible flashing action or tumbling for the 10-15 seconds that I followed it, which was not surprising, considering that it was launched 4 years ago. --------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan T. Wojack tlj18@juno.com 39.706d N 75.683d W 4 hours behind UT (-4) ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Tue Jul 16 2002 - 23:54:44 EDT