Hi everyone, A nice evening of observations, the first real one since last summer for me. I tested a new setup with a portable computer and Starry Night astronomy software to measure my coordinates right on the spot instead of marking the location of the sat on my sky atlas and measuring it later. Here are the observations in IOD format, the comments follow : 24680 96 072A 1750 E 20010522013642200 37 25 0056530+592690 68 S+080 07 23937 96 029F 1750 E 20010522023444800 37 25 1949910+442330 68 I+080 07 26473 00 047A 1750 E 20010522014712500 37 25 1130590+430990 68 S+005 07 19460 88 078A 1750 E 20010522025147600 37 25 1023730+243590 68 I+020 07 25725 99 023B 1750 E 20010522031120500 37 25 1515960+011090 68 S+067 07 23728 95 066A 1750 E 20010522041338400 37 25 2102560+334630 68 S 24680 is USA 129 26473 is Lacrosse 4 19460 is USA 32 23937 is TiPS 25725 is Milstar 3 Centaur Rk 23728 is USA 116 Important notice : site 1750 is an unofficial one located at 45.899 N, 72.433 W, 87 m. My usual site 1746 has bad viewing conditions and I'm gonna move soon to a better location. USA 129 was caught near the end of its pass low in the north. Lac 4 was nice and bright, an easy one for beginners. Tips was observed twice (02:35 and 04:23 UT). Very interesting obs with the tether very faint on the first pass (mag. 9) but the lower mass produced many mag 6 flashes. The upper one made only a few to mag 7. The lower end of the tether was often brighter. On the second pass, almost to our vertical, the tether was brighter but hte masses produced less flashes. The timing on USA 32 is uncertain due to an error in the way I took my time mark on the WWV radio. The error could be off by a second or two. This satellite caught us by surprise with its optical behavior. I read it could sparkle and already witnessed such an effect but not like what I saw tonight. About 30 seconds before my obs, I took the satellite for an aircraft because of the way it was flashing. It really looked like a strobe for a few seconds with flashes reaching mag +1 or 0. Then it became steady but fainting slowly. NOSS 5 G (#14180) was observed and timed but the wind blew my binoculars off position and I was not able to reacquire my reference stars since they were in the Milky Way. I recommend observation of the Centaur rocket. It's amazingly bright and slow. It is at a high altitude (range was 5000 km) and very easy binocular object. I hope the analysts on the list won't have problems fitting my obs with the known orbits of these objects. Cheers, Dan -- Daniel Deak representant, projet spatial Starshine Drummondville, Quebec COSPAR site 1746 : 45.8537°N, 72.4857°W, 90 m., UTC-4:00 Site en francais sur les satellites: French-language satellite web site : http://www.obsat.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 : Mon May 21 2001 - 23:20:16 PDT