In a message dated 9/19/2005 12:51:22 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, seesat@rogers.com writes: >>According to my calculations, the reboost on Sep 15 was too small to account for your having missed the object. I used elsets as old as 6 days and as recent as a few hours, and obtained substantially the same prediction as Heavens-Above. >>A few seconds before 20:15 PDT, it passed near the end-star of the handle of the Big Dipper. This was about 29 deg above the NW horizon. A little over one minute later is passed near Vega, about 81 deg above the western horizon. If you kept your eye moving back and forth along the path between those stars, during this period, you should easily have spotted ISS. >>We will probably never be able to determine precisely why you did not see it, but there may be clues in this comment you made in an earlier post: <<<< I began watching shortly before 8 pm Sunday night, eyes glued to the NW, 11x80 binoculars strapped around my neck. When my watch said 8:15 and no sign of the ISS I began to wonder what was going on. I did spot a few airliners and a helicopter during my little vigil, and to amuse myself scanned the moon's face as it slowly climbed upward from the horizon. >>>> >>Sounds like after waiting 15 min for the big event, you became a bit antsy when the object did not appear at 8:15 PM PDT, as predicted. This may have adversely affected your concentration, even caused you too take your eyes off the predicted path - just long enough to miss it. Remember, it covers a lot of sky in even 30 s. >>If, as many folks do, you allow your wristwatch to run fast, by even 30 s, then that could have contributed to your feeling that the object was overdue, causing you to turn away too soon and just long enough to miss it. >>In any case, there will be many more good ISS passes, and I wish you well observing them.<< Thanks for your comments. I could have missed it if it for those reasons if it were magnitude +2, but surely not if it were magnitude -1. The sky in San Diego is pretty bright, especially with a nearly full moon rising and a thin nocturnal haze forming, and stars of magnitude +2 and fainter tend to wash out. But I could see Vega quite clearly, and -1 is considerably brighter than Vega. Also, my wife was out with me, and her eyes are better than mine. She could have spotted it even if I couldn't. The first satellite I ever saw was the Sputnik 1 rocket body (or was it Sputnik 2?), which passed over Buffalo NY when I was a kid back in 1957, and it was no problem. The Buffalo Evening News posted schedules for the novel astronomical event, and everyone in the neighborhood was out to see it. It helped that it was tumbling, of course, which made it grow fainter and brighter every few seconds. It wasn't terribly bright, and as I recall that evening the skies had scattered clouds, but it was quite visible passing between them. Echo 1 also passed over Buffalo a few years later, and it was brighter than Venus--absolutely trivial to see it. And I remember seeing Echo 2 pass over Buffalo, watching it fade into its sunset and wink out, but I don't recall the date. Must have been early 1960s when I was in high school. I did start to get antsy last night, but only about ten minutes after Show Time, when I began to wonder where it was. Before that I was glued to the NW sky--I can't see how anything about as bright as an airliner could have escaped me (but I guess it somehow did!). Typically my watch is about two minutes slow (it's an old windup watch that I reset each day), and I allowed for that during my vigil. I had a whole minute to a minute and a half to catch it, and although I'm getting slower these days, I don't think my eyeblinks last a whole minute(!). I had my binoculars, but I was not scanning the sky with them, just my unaided eyesight, such as it is. I can't imagine both my wife and me being distracted long enough to miss a bright, moving object. This is no meteor, which if you look away for a tenth of a second you miss it. One of life's little mysteries, I guess. Heck, I've seen Uranus and Neptune with my binoculars, also Ceres and a number of comets (you have to follow most of these over a period of a few days, to be sure you have indeed seen them). I should have been able to see the ISS no sweat, unless it was quite a bit fainter than advertised. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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