Was out observing Friday evening (May 17/97 UT) with a group of students. Thought I=92d impress them with a few satellite predictions. I ran QuickSat against a Molczan tle file (cs970515) filtering for satellites only brighter than 3rd magnitude. I came up with a handful of sats that with the bright twilight we were observing under were less than impressive. I was upstaged, and caught off-guard by a brilliant sat rising out of the south around 03:35 UT. Easily surpassed Mars in magnitude (Mars is at 0.0) as it glinted for several seconds. I took some good natured ribbing for not being able to id the brightest satellite we saw. Afterwards I ran the cs970515 Molczan file looking for a match. Based on the time (to the nearest minute or two), and direction, the only match I could find was for USA 129 (Norad 24680). These were the elements (twenty-nine days old) from the Molczan=20 file: USA 129 15.0 3.0 0.0 5.1 v 1 24680U 96072 A 97110.88696056 0.00017500 00000-0 18385-3 0 04 2 24680 97.8600 173.9660 0541000 132.5636 227.4363 14.74552770 09 Hoping to confirm this I had a similar pass (same time, and approx=20 altitude and azimuth) for USA 129 last night (May 21/97 03:35 UT). Unfortunately I had better than 9/10 cloud cover. I was just about to give up, turned off my time signal, thinking either I was wrong or had missed it with the cloud cover when I glimpsed it through a hole. Again it flared brighter than Mars for just under two seconds. =20 Approximate altitude and azimuth when it flared was 40deg alt. and 190 deg. azi.. The sun at that time was at azi. 320 deg and alt. -10 deg. Based on the above element set it was running about 3 to 3 and a half minutes late. Some questions: I felt pretty sure this was USA 129. Has anyone observed it recently such that the above elements are indeed running about 3 minutes or more slow? Has anyone observed a bright glint from this sat before? Is USA 129 in a sun-synchronous orbit, based on its inclination=20 (>90 deg) and the fact that it repeated the same ground track almost exactly 4 days later?=20 QuickSat actually selected USA 129 on my short list of sats brighter than 3rd magnitude. Although I ignored it because it predicted a=20 magnitude 18! I can understand the errorneous magnitude prediction because there is no base magnitude for 24680 in the quicksat.mag file. But I=92m confused why it showed up in the short list. Does QuickSat ignore the magnitude filter if the satellite is not found in the=20 magnitude file? I=92ve got another good pass coming in a couple of days...if the clouds will just clear! As always...clear skies Bill (long. 97.27, lat. 49.85)