Monday evening (early March 1 UTC), with very nice weather, Mike and Fred and I went to BCRC (30.315N, 97.866W, 280m) -- Mike with the 8-inch (20cm) scope, Fred with his 7x50 binocular, and I with 8x42 Orion Ultraview. Fred has got the knack for spotting flaring geosats now and saw a few before Mike and I did. Thanks to Mike for the on-site IDs! Here are the ones I saw with binoculars (and managed to write down on site and/or at least remember after getting home): Cat.# COSPAR# Common Name 24714 97-002B Nahuel 1A 25371 98-037A Intelsat 805 26761 01-018A XM-1 27426 02-023A DirecTV 5 28137 04-001A Telstar 14 28526 05-003A AMC-12 Technically, the peak date for flaring geosats at our latitude was still at least a week away, so seeing these illustrates that the season is, at our latitude at least, a couple of weeks or so in duration. Two or three times as many as above were visible in Mike's telescope at "medium power" (about 55x I think), and this was not a long session, as we closed down a little after 11:00 PM local time. 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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