Too many flashes
Ed Cannon (ecannon@mail.utexas.edu)
Wed, 06 Oct 1999 04:44:25 -0500
Tuesday evening was a first, in that I used up 100 clicks on
Molniya 3-38 (90-52A, 20646) and ETS 6 (94-56A, 23230) and had
to stop my stopwatch, write down that data and restart in time
for Superbird A! The worst part was that ETS 6 was doing
one-power flashes while I was writing down data. I'd look up,
and it was still flashing one-power (many of them about +3).
After Superbird A, I found ETS 6 again (with the help of the
Bright Star Atlas 2000 -- no one-power flashes by then).
90- 52 A 99-10-06 01:26:33 EC 194.3 0.2 35 5.55 mag +4.5->inv
94- 56 A 99-10-06 03:46:51 EC 5137.4 0.5 446 11.519 mag +3.0->inv
Molniya 3-38 has secondary flashes that I only saw sometimes;
the pattern is roughly primary - 1.8 sec. - secondary - 3.7 sec
- primary.
I hesitate to report this, but with ETS 6 I seemed to see two
different patterns. Earlier there were some secondaries with
roughly this pattern: primary - 3.05 sec. - secondary - 8.46 -
primary. Later, after Superbird A, I got just a few clicks
that suggest a symmetrical shorter pattern: primary - 5.8 sec.
- secondary - 5.8 sec. - primary. If these weren't illusions,
it seems that must be different surfaces involved.
As for Superbird A, I find the trickiest part seems to be when
to expect to be able to begin to see it, either with binoculars
or one-power. The only one-power flash I managed to see last
night was at about 3:28:48.5. My first click on it using
binoculars was at about 3:25:56.5, and the last one was at
about 3:31:29.5.
The location was 30.3068N, 97.7267W, 150m.
Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA
http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~ecannon/satellite.htm