Greetings, I am new to the group and would like your assistance in identifying what I suppose were groups of satellites I observed crossing the full moon early morning on May 13, 2006. You see all manner of things cross the moon; planes, birds, etc, but this experience was a first. I was looking at the full moon through a telescope and binocular viewer, and noticed what I thought was a series of satellites cross in front of the Moon from Lunar E to W (Mare Crisium toward Aristarchus)(Earthwise W to E). My observing position is in southwest Houston, W 95°36’12”, N 29°35’12”. The lunar position was about (J2000) RA: 15h01m, Dec: –20°56’. I believe there were three objects about 00:20 local time, 05:20 UT (about 10 seconds between them), then 3-4 objects about 05:22 UT (a single one and then two or three almost at the same time but offset in lunar latitude), and finally one object at 05:26 UT crossing near the lunar equator. They caught me by surprise so only glanced at my watch, and wrote down what I remembered on a sketch of the Moon after all had passed by. Don't know if there were any before that, but had been viewing for 10 minutes or so off and on. After the final one passed by I watched for another 10 minutes or so but saw no more objects. They were not visible before crossing the Moon or after leaving so were in Earth's shadow I suppose. They were all the same size (about the size of the head of a small straight pin) on a full moon that filled 3/4 of the eyepiece field of view and were perfectly round and black. Each looked like the shadow of one of the moons of Jupiter as it crosses the surface or Mercury transiting the sun. All the objects traveled at the same rate and all paths were parallel (close to and perhaps exactly lunar E-W). All were, however, somewhat different lunar latitude, from the Moon's equator (00:26) to perhaps 60 deg N lat (00:20). I estimated the rate was about 6-7 sec to cross the 0.5-degree full Moon at the equator. Of course, that is at best a guess made after the fact. Even the number of objects at 05:20 and 05:22 UT were what I thought I saw and wrote down in my notes after all passed by. Thank you for your time and any suggestions you might have. DJ McCracken Sugar Land, Texas Fort Bend Astronomy Club ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 18 2006 - 01:18:12 EDT