Below are some rough "maximum display" times for USA 32 (19460, 88-078A) from the past several nights. By "maximum display", I mean the few seconds per pass when it brightened by at least 2 magnitudes and also flashed extremely rapidly. During the maximum display time, it's easily visible without magnification, while during most of a pass, my experience is that it's generally more like +4 and brightens about 0.5 magnitude every 1.nn second. I really do think that the maximum display is in some way analogous to a normal specular flare, in that enough observations might allow a predictable pattern to be discovered. Times are UTC: 2001/05/28 03:09:36 to 03:09:40 2001/05/31 03:16:46 to 03:16:51 2001/06/01 02:45:27 (only one click during max. display due to clouds) 2001/06/03 03:23:24 to 03:23:29 I'm sure that I have quite a few more such timings for USA 32 as well as its apparent twin USA 81, although it would take some work to dig them up and organize them. By the way, in a telescope (Thanks, Mike!) the maximum displays of it and USA 81 are awesome. Maybe Ulrich or others who can do that sort of thing can get some good video! Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 Jun 03 2001 - 17:10:05 PDT