Last night at BCRC, there were a lot of clouds in the early evening.
So we were looking in the holes for possible satellites and I noticed
a flash up in the northeast near a bright star in Cassiopeia.
The object turned out to be Cosmos 2388 (27409, 02-17A). It flashed
to as bright as magnitude 5 over the next 40 minutes as it gradually
moved south and the range decreased from 15000 miles to 11000 miles.
It seemed to be fading at the end as the sun-satellite-observer
angle must have been changing to be less favorable.
2007 Oct 9 (Times are UT) 27409 Cosmos 2388 (02-17A)
Hrs Min Alt Azi Range(miles)
1 20 40 41 15152
1 30 39 45 14229
1 40 38 50 13258
1 50 37 55 12242
2 0 35 61 11190
The period was measured over 38 minutes as 3.377 seconds.
This object last maneuvered about 2006 day 328. At that time,
the mean motion increased instead of the appropriate decrease.
Mike McCants
Austin, TX (BCRC - lat 30.3N, long 97.9W)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive:
http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 09 2007 - 14:13:29 EDT