Although while entering stopwatch data on my PC I clicked the wrong button, Gorizont 13 was confirmed some hours ago as the flashing geosynch the previous evening with the flash period of 86.1, as it had moved on several degrees to the west. It again was flashing more brightly than any other Gorizont I've seen, I think, +4.0 it seems to me. I ran out of time to check for ASC 1 and GStar 3. I saw an interesting unid whose best points I zapped from my stopwatch when I clicked the wrong button. It was west to east, took five or six minutes, flashed occasionally. A southbound one crossed with it, right after an unid geosynch flash, and managed to be recorded before I clicked the wrong button, but after an hour or more, I was not satisfied at all with any candidates. This pass was roughly 3:28-3:34 May 18 UTC (last surviving click, maybe a flash, was 3:32:49, and tracked it for possibly two more minutes after that). It went from roughly az 220, alt 40, to az 135, alt 65, passed kind of near eta and gamma VIR along the way, last (lost) points near 15 and 32 BOO. Again I don't have enough disk space to get the alldat.tle file. (It's a daily fight.) I had a nice coincidence, two northbound side-by-side about three degrees apart: Cosmos 1302 Rk (81-084B, 12792) and Cosmos 332 Rk (70-028B, 04370). My stopwatch error lost a very bright flash from Iridium 911 (97-030G, 24842) in or near UMa. Due to going to supper with friends, I didn't have Orion 3 predictions, but I guess it didn't matter.... First time I've accidentally zapped stopwatch data in years. Before getting to BCRC, at supper I told my friends about Gravity Probe B. We went out to try to see it, and it gave us a hoped-for very bright flash in bright twilight just before 2:00 UTC, in the SW. One of them was interested in seeing Comet NEAT (2001 Q4) [reversed notation], and it wasn't hard from their porch, although my friend wasn't used to holding binoculars up and star-hopping around. BCRC: 30.315N, 97.866W, 280m. 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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