Hi Paul, Bjorn and List, I haven't contributed much lately, partly due to time spent on meteorite work and SOHO comet hunting, but primarily due to perpetually poor skies this summer. Well, we finally got a nice high pressure ridge, so seeing is excellent tonite. I've been following the recent threads on attempting to reacquire TDF-1 (#19621) and determine its current flash period (and flash window timing), so that was first on my agenda this evening. I acquired it within 10 seconds of putting my 8x56 binocs to M11 -- it (the satellite that is) was flashing nicely to around 5th magnitude as of 21:15 PDT (9/3 4:15 UTC). I started the stopwatch at 4:17:15.2 on a flash and timed 33 flash periods in 688.63 seconds for a flash period of 20.868 +/- 0.002 seconds. Unfortunately my PPAS template is on my work computer, so a properly formatted report will have to wait 'til tomorrow. Just wanted to get something out quick in case any west coast satellite trackers wanted to try to acquire it. While watching TDF-1 for those 15 minutes or so, I watched a dim LEO pair ascending from the south not far from TDF-1, their paths criss-crossing each other, only slightly out of phase. This made identification easy: GEO-IK (#23411, 94078A) and NOAA 2 (#06235, 72082A). They both appeared around magnitude +6.5. Back to satellite watching! --Rob P.S. Observations from my usual COSPAR location in Newport Coast, CA 33.6028N, 117.8263W, ~200m AMSL (WGS-84) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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