An hour ago I observed Lacrosse 5 (05-016A) at its 17:55 UTC pass. Positions will follow later. The satellite showed a rather irregular brightness behaviour during this pass. While was I setting up my camera it made a short bright flare to mag. 0 low in the west at about 17:53:50 UTC (+/- 10s) lasting only a few seconds. After that it went back to much less brightness (mag +2 to +2.5). While climbing towards Vulpecula it brightened slowly to mag. +1.5 at 17:55:00 - 17:55:10 UTC, and I took my 1st of two photographs. Next I had to operate the camera for the second image, but when looking up at around 17:55:30 UTC it was fainter, about +2.5. Between 17:55:50 and 17:56:10 UTC it brightened again to maybe +1.5 in Vulpecula during a few seconds, then quickly dimmed again and actually went out of visual detection range for me just after 17:56:10 UTC. I captured the peak brightness and fading part on photograph, the rapid fading near the end is apparent in it. See picture at URL: http://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2006/11/lacrosse-5-flaring-irregular.html Note that the satellite was nowhere near shadow entry at this moment: in fact, it should have been approaching its maximum brightness at this moment instead of fading. - Marco ----- Dr Marco Langbroek - SatTrackCam Leiden, Cospar 4353 Leiden, the Netherlands. 52.15412 N, 4.49081 E (WGS84), +0 m ASL SatTrackCam: http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek/satcam.html Station (b)log: http://sattrackcam.blogspot.com Atom RSS: http://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/atom.xml e-mail: sattrackcam@wanadoo.nl ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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