Last night Mike called to alert me to a good though twilight pass of the Molniya 3-53 Rk (27835, 03-029B). I saw it but failed to get out the door with my stopwatch to time it. It seemed to me the brightest maximum was almost as bright as Arcturus. The tumble period seemed to be about 10-15 seconds. I was able to follow it for about a minute with my 10x50 binoculars. IRS P2 (94-068A, 23323) did one of its best passes. The first flash I saw was extremely bright, seemed like -6, if that's possible. As I was doing predictions it didn't dawn on me that Hubble and Okean-O Rk (25861, 99-039B) would both have very good passes at the same time. Both were very easy one-power objects for maybe a couple of minutes and could be seen at the same time with peripheral vision by looking between them. Also visible without magnification with HST was a GPS Rk (20362, 89-097B). I also saw two other GPS Rk without the binoculars: 20303/89-085B and 20453/90-008B. Lacrosse 3 and some maxima from Intelsat 501 Rk (12497, 81-050B) were visible without magnification at the same time. NOSS 2-3 were different; outlier was still the brightest, and it and the trailer were visible without binoculars, but the leader was significantly fainter and only visible with binoculars, throughout all of the pass that I saw. (I didn't see them before culmination due to the exciting pass of IRS P2.) Envisat (27386, 02-009A) was a fourth equally bright "star" in the handle of the Big Dipper (UMA bear's tail, I think). I easily saw 17 objects without binoculars and three others with some difficulty. All but the Molniya 3-53 Rk were from the E. Ney Museum grounds, 30.307N, 97.727W, 150m. The sky was very clear, but there is a pretty fair likelihood of tropical storm "Claudette" clouds by Tuesday night. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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