Last night the cloud problems were just about as bad as the previous night, but luck was better. I was able to observe a few flashes of 90007/00653A on either side of phi Virginis between 3:23:27 and 3:26:41. The star actually passed a little bith north of it sometime between 3:24:15.65 and 3:25:52.77. I'm pretty sure that the brightest flashes were at least +4, since they were so easy to see in spite of the thin cloud layer up there at the time. After the 3:26:41 click, I looked at my stopwatch or something and then was not able to find the right spot again, nor even as I kept trying could I find phi and upsilon Vir any longer. Though it was truncated by clouds, this episode was roughly one hour earlier than I saw it on June 2 (which was about 4:22-4:28) and about 25 minutes earlier than on June 8 (3:49-4:01, with the last couple of minutes in telescope). So it seems to be flashing here roughly five minutes earlier each night. At that rate it will get lost in twilight here in about two weeks or less, I guess. The observing location for this and the next one on June 14 UTC was 30.307N, 97.727W, 150m. Before I saw 90007, I was able to watch GSTAR 1 (85-35A, 15677) for several minutes. It seems to have accelerated since a few nights ago. Its brightest flashes, though very fast, are also *very* bright and almost certainly should be visible at one-power on a decent night. Unfortunately, it's geosynchronous and so a western hemisphere only object for some time to come. And it's now flashing too early for those a couple of time zones west of us. 88- 81 A 00-06-08 03:42:28.6 EC 652.5 0.2 9 72.50 mag +3.5->inv 88- 81 A 00-06-14 03:02:29.7 EC 645.2 0.2 9 71.69 mag +3.5->inv The observing location for June 8 was 30.314N, 97.866W, 280m. 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 : Tue Jun 13 2000 - 23:37:33 PDT