Thursday evening as I was watching Superbird A flashing (more about this below), a fairly bright tumbling object appeared from the southwest, three to four degrees to the right of good old Superbird. I managed to get a relatively useful position or two as it tracked from WSW to NNE and grew fainter as it moved more and more slowly. On Friday Mike confirmed it to be the USA 179 Centaur, which for Thursday evening had elements 515 days old and for which I had predictions about 40-45 minutes later than when it actually appeared. Well, so, earlier tonight as I was looking for an LEO in the south, here came a bright, tumbling object going NNE, almost beside the LEO. It seems almost certainly to be the USA 179 Rk, observed again due to serendipity. What are the odds? It was about 15 minutes early on the revised search elements Mike derived from the night before. USA 179 was the NRO launch 1 (NROL-1) on 8-31 or 9-01, 2004. The fuel dump by the centaur was observed by numerous people in the NE USA and in Canada, including Ted and Kevin. There was considerable discussion about it on SeeSat-L before and after the launch. Superbird A (20040, 89-41A) is now flashing at about 4:00-4:08 UTC (as seen using 8x42 binoculars). This is at about RA 9:44-52, Dec +7. I believe it flashes somewhat earlier to the west of here and later to the east of here. It flashes about a minute later from night to night. It flashes about every 10.5 seconds now. The flashes are visible without magnification from a dark-sky site. They're bright but are so quick that it's not easy to get enough photons to see them without magnification. FWIW, I saw OTV 2 (by accident) on Wednesday evening but didn't manage to come up with a useful position, and it got away so quickly that Mike didn't get to see it. Congratulations to Brad for looking early and getting good positions. Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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