Well, I had some more fun with the Clarke belt last night! I'm not yet sure how many of them I was able to see, in spite of the moonlight and scattered clouds, with my handheld 10x50 binoculars. I guess I saw about six to ten, including one pair (fainter one leading brighter one) that I was able to follow for several minutes from about RA 00:05-20, Dec -5) For those who enjoy something a little faster than grass growing, have a look! Most of the time, except when they're passing very near a star, I have to look at them, look away, and look back to clearly see the change in position. Correction regarding 90007/00-653A. I almost forgot to look for it but found it with a bright flash at 3:27:21 and was able to watch it for about 11.5 minutes. That was "too late" for it to be 12 minutes earlier than last night when it peaked from 3:28 to 3:31. So I went to the SeeSat archive and found that it was running *five* minutes earlier per night last summer. My apologies for the mistake! (I think it was one of the TDF satellites that actually was 12 minutes earlier per night.) As to when to look, from what I can see in the archive, including Geoff Chester's observations, it seems that on the USA east coast it was flashing significantly later than here. 00-653 A 00-10-05 03:38:51 EC 689.9 0.4 13 53.07 mag +4->inv asymm 2ndary Watched Superbird A from about 3:11:37 to 3:18:18, when I could no longer see it. From here it's still low in the east, which is directly above south Austin, so I used my binoculars and in order to watch it continuously rested my elbows on the roof of a telescope shed. The "Bird-Ruben" SL-08 Rk (26406) is a nice one-power flasher: 00- 39 C 00-10-05 01:30:28 EC 85.0 0.4 30 2.83 This is 24799, a CZ-3A Rk that launched "DFH-3 2", observed with binoculars, maxima about magnitude +4 I think: 97- 21 B 00-10-05 01:36:08 EC 67.7 0.4 20 3.38 Observing location: 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Oct 05 2000 - 01:09:37 PDT