78-64A/SeaSat 1 and 94-35B/23133
Ed Cannon (ecannon@mail.utexas.edu)
Sat, 28 Jun 1997 01:44:52 -0500
Wednesday night from San Antonio, Texas, USA, SeaSat 1 (78-64A, 10967)
was at least magnitude 1.5 to 1.0 for much of its pass. That's quite
a bit brighter than the Quicksat-predicted maximum of 2.8. Friday
night from Austin, it was a more usual mag. 3 or so. There's a small
image of Seasat at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mip/seasat.html.
For those who can observe low inclination objects, on Friday night
object 94-35B (23133, UHF F/O F3 Rk) made a very nice magnitude 1.5
to 1.0 pass culminating 37 degrees high at azimuth 181. It's not
currently included in molczan.tle, visible.htm, visual.txt, or
Rainer's Top 50, and I'm not sure why I began getting its elements.
(I've seen at least one other UHF rocket this bright or brighter,
and another one flashing to mag. 3 at a range of 2,400 km.)
Aside: I just discovered another satellites page -- for Amman, Jordan:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/1092/sat.html
Ed Cannon
Austin, Texas, USA
30.3086N, 97.9279W, 165M