Congratulations to Kevin on finding the unknown geosat! Some hours ago before it got cloudy I was surprised to see an extra +3.5 star just north of beta Aquarii (Sadalsuud, about RA 21:32, Dec -5.5 [2000]). It remained that bright for a number of minutes, as the star moved on to the west. Before it got too faint, and before the clouds could cover it up, I got a very good position which matched very well with GE 3 (97-050A, 24936). This was from the Ney Museum site, 30.307N, 97.727W, 150m. Conditions were not very good, with a lot of light pollution as well as the clouds. (Clouds and other things have prevented me observing for a while.) I was able to see two other geosats very easily with 8x42, but due to clouds I wasn't able to get good positions. One was probably either Galaxy 11 or DBS 3. One of them seemed to match pretty well with GOES 12 (01-031A, 26871). It's actually past the peak of flaring geosat season for our latitude. Regarding 90019 being 03-790B, there actually was another one discovered the same day (Oct. 17, 2003). It was 90018, 03-790A, a geosat, found by Rainer Kracht: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Oct-2003/0241.html Looks like it's fairly possible now that we're going to get mild tropical weather here for a couple of days -- more clouds. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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