Thanks to everyone who identified Uranus for me! I didn't even think of that "star" possibly being one of the *major* planets. I saw it again last night, but it hadn't moved as much as I'd expected. Saturday evening's session was unfortunately shortened due to me not feeling up to par, but I did get to see the small parade of three geosynchs again. They went past 23:00, -5 (just south of 11 Aquarii) during the period of 1:50 to 2:20 Oct. 1 UTC. Getting home early, I spent some time doing my best to ID them, and I get the following, in east-to-west order: 25152 98-006A BRAZILSAT B3 24713 97-002A GE 2 *[23132 94-035A UFO 3] 18951 88-018A SPACENET 3R, or maybe 24936 97-050A GE 3 *The predictions also put UFO 3 right there, but as the elements are 433 days old, I'm inclined to rule it out. A little while later, I was able to find another one and from about 2:39 to 2:52 follow it from about RA 21:20 to 21:35, Dec. -5. I actually tracked it several more minutes but didn't get the data written down. This one appears to have been Galaxy XI (26038, 99-071A), more than 2.5 hours before shadow entry. I run into a problem with these with respect to the flaring geosynch phenomenon, based on Rainer Kreskin's message from Sept. 1999: http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/Sep-1999/0002.html Both nights now I've seen these objects up to three hours or more before shadow entry, which doesn't seem to fit well with the flaring geosynch hypothesis. Is it possible that the flaring phenomenon starts that long before they go into the shadow? The Moon's going to become a problem soon. I hope the weather here holds at least a couple of more nights! Observing location was 30.314N, 97.866W, 280m. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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