In spite of passing sea-breeze clouds during almost the entire session, Thursday evening (June 9 local time, June 10 UTC), there was quite a bit to see. At the somewhat early end of the session due to the clouds, I looked for one more in the northwest. To my surprise there was a magnitude +1.5 (maybe brighter?) object to the left of the pointer stars (west side of the bowl of the Big Dipper, part of UMa). It was moving quite slowly higher up the sky. It hit a star left of the bowl. I tracked it as it climbed higher and slightly south, and just before a cloud got in the way, it hit a very close pair of stars. Findsat identified it as 14795, 84-012F, NOSS 6(F). Quicksat predicted the magnitude near the first position at +9.1 (int. mag. +6.5). The observing site was BCRC, 30.315N, 97.866W, 280m. Mike saw it also but had already begun putting away the telescope. Here are the two positions that I got (UTC, 2000 epoch, using HomePlanet to get the RA and Dec): 4:40:25.05 - 11:16.1, +52.8 4:42:22.85 - 13:09.9, +38.5 Conjunctions. I was tracking MSX (96-024A, 23851) and saw two others following it! They turned out to be SPOT 2 (90-005A, 20436) and Adeos 1 Rk (96-046C, 24279). Later I looked for Terra (99-068A, 25994) and found two objects traveling along together less than a degree apart. The second one was Astex (71-089A, 05560). The expected and observed conjunctions for the evening were two passes of the NOSS 3-3 pair and a pass of the NOSS 3-1 pair (visible without binoculars for some of the pass). Both passes of the NOSS 2-2 triangle were obscured by passing clouds. Grace 1 and 2 don't really count as a conjunction, but they once again got pretty bright in the northwest. Mike got HESSI (02-004A, 27370) in the telescope, and it was flashing with a period of a little over one second. Iridium 911 (97-030G, 24842) and 914 (97-030A, 24836) have been putting on pretty nice flashing displays the last several sessions, including earlier tonight. I found 90007 flashing at about 2:28 UTC. It appears that its flash episode will soon be too early in twilight. Superbird A (89-041A, 20040) was too low -- behind a tree for the telescope. Right now it's probably flashing some minutes before 3:00 UTC. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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