I went looking for object 90007 last night and was rewarded by managing to observe a complete cycle of flashes rising from magnitude 8 or 9 up to magnitude 4 (Ed saw a few with his unaided eye in spite of the moon) and falling back to magnitude 9. Revised elset: Unknown 000601 1 90007U 00653A 00277.46320538 0.00000015 00000-0 12538+4 0 08 2 90007 5.7700 59.3336 0052000 341.0894 18.9107 1.00215422 05 The complete cycle was observed from about 03:15UT to a maximum around 03:28 to 03:31 and then declining until 03:53UT (Oct. 4). The fundamental flash period was timed as 53.02 seconds. This is quite a bit slower than the 48 second period in June and the 49 second period in July, so the slow-down of about 1 second per month continues. In June, the brightest flashes occurred 12 minutes earlier each night. It has been about 120 days since then. So perhaps some sort of precession cycle of 120 days is correct. (1440 minutes / 120 days = 12 minutes per day.) The flash pattern was complex and changing. Initially there was one sharp bright flash and one "slow" fainter flash. These flashes were not symmetric in the 53 seconds, the separations were 25.7 and 27.3 seconds. There were other, fainter flashes in between. At maximum, the bright flash was preceded by some fainter flashes. There seemed to be a phase shift at maximum. My final timings of 5 flashes per cycle were 0.0, 23.1, 23.4, 29.6, 29.9. These flashes were all "sharp" and about magnitude 9. Of course we are interested in observations from other sites to try to understand the rotation axis. Obs from BCRC: 30.32N, 97.87W. Mike McCants Austin, TX ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Wed Oct 04 2000 - 13:11:29 PDT