Reading the comments from everyone in the Seesat-Digest that just arrived, it
sounds like the pass I saw may have been the brightest so far. I estimated
Atlantis
at about magnitude -1 (or slightly better), with the ISS trailing behind
shining at least as bright as Sirius (-1.7) -- and we had a lot of high, thin
clouds.
Well, I guess as the ISS grows, this was bound to happen sooner or later --
trying to tell the station from the orbiter by brightness would harder and
harder, and sure enough, here we have so many people coming up with different
opinions.
[Sadly, my cable tv provider, in the course of "upgrading service in my
area," {HA!} disconnected my service entirely. A quick check of NASA TV
would have solved this mystery. Great timing, Comcast.]
But I have to say, using the predicted TLEs NASA provides on their Real Time
Data web pages, the same TLEs which I got on Thursday, and which I posted
here on Seesat on Friday, I think NASA's predicted TLEs were vindicated.
While those TLEs were predicting a 6 degree (6 second) gap at maximum
elevation, and most people here who observed their pass this morning seem to
be saying they gap was 4 our 5 degrees, I just read a news report that the
undocking had been delayed slightly due to computer problems. That might
explain why they weren't 6 degrees apart yet. All things considered,
reboosts, late undocking, NASA's predicted TLE's came pretty darned close.
By the way, someone mentioned that Heavens-Above had shown the ISS leading.
I had checked the TLE it was using for Atlantis earlier this morning and
found its epoch date was 24 hours old, meaning it was valid for a time when
the spacecraft were still docked. I'm confused how that TLE could have been
used for Atlantis's orbit AFTER undocking? I could see doing that for the
ISS, but it's the shuttle that changes orbit after undocking. I wonder if
they got them mixed up?
Jim Cook
Germantown, MD
39.2N, 77.3W
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Sep 18 2000 - 09:12:28 PDT