At 14:29 22/09/01 , Floyd Weaver wrote: >Good Evening Folks, > > A few nights ago (9-16 UTC) I had an interesting sat ob. I saw what I >figured to be Midas 9. I first noted this sat just to the east of the north >star at 1:10 and followed it up to near zenith at 1:15 UTC. It was going >through a cycle of maybe a minute duration. I did not time it other than >mentally, so I do not have an accurate time, but after one flare it then >gave a double flare about a quarter of a minute later. > > During 1998 I saw Midas 7. These are unusually high sats (over 2,000 miles) >to see 1 power. Noting how old these sats are I do not think they are >working, but are rather tumbling dead sats. From my own observations in the 60s and up to 1974-5 I would say you were extremely lucky to see midas7 without optical assistance. My brightest magnitude for this object was 6.0. More usually varying between mag 7 and mag 10 at ranges of 4800Km. In late 64 it was slowly tumbling with an increasing period that was already over a 100 seconds. The brightest magnitude in the collected WSRN brightness catalog was mag 4.8. In those days I was using a 20x120 monocular known as an "apogee scope" which I sometimes regret giving away!! Incidentally I had a nice high elevation pass of midas 9 at 1133 UT tonite, and saw nothing using 7x50 binoculars. I estimate magnitude 7.5 limiting magnitude. Tony Beresford 8597, -34.9638, 138.6333E, 100mASL ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Sep 22 2001 - 08:38:14 EDT