Last night at least two geosynchs were brighter than +6, and again this was about three hours before shadow entry. Does flaring that long before going into shadow fit any general flaring theory or is it maybe just idiosyncracies of a few objects? Mike McCants was back on site and pointed his 8-inch dobsonian at them, and he also found one or two fainter ones in that area, one only about 45 seconds from one of the bright ones. Then later he went looking in the area near shadow-entry (about 45 degrees to the east) and found a few more including one with a two-second flash period and a pair separated by only 30 seconds. Haven't had a chance to do IDs yet, but I'm almost certain that one of the bright ones is Brasilsat B3 (25152, 98-006A) and another Galaxy XI (26038, 99-071A). 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 03 2000 - 02:19:58 PDT