Big acknowledgements and thanks to Björn who definitely solved the little mystery about MetOp-A.
In fact, as he pointed it out, I misidentified MetOp-A with its "red herring" Meteor Priroda rocket (1981-65 B), observed within about 1sec of the H-A prediction. My estimation of that rocket brightness was a 4.7 magnitude at 25° altitude (and 33° azimuth : NE-NNE).
That is to say MetOp-A must have been rather faint, since I *especially* waited for it passing through my B10x50 field, without being able to spot it ... and being forced to wait for the following satellite to come !
In such a binoculars field of 11 Persei (BSC 785 ; HIP 12692) I would have expected a limiting magnitude for a satellite of at least 6.2 taking in account the very luminous area of my parisian sky at low altitude (whereas I had for example that same night a more convenient limit at mag 7.5 in Polaris field)
=> I should have been more wary about spotting MetOp-A in that poor sky area, since I had already observed another very faint pass of MetOp-A, in Cassiopeiae, irregularly varying between mag 6 and mag 7, just a few days before, on August 29, 2007.
Moreover, note that I also observed that night of sept 4, about half an hour later than its rocket, Meteor PRIRODA (1981-65 A) , in Cassiopeiae, spotting it within 1sec of the H-A predition, that figure being my current error bar (when not trying harder : 0.2 -0.3 sec being in that case near of my best).
Finally here is a remark about the "red herring" concept. :-)
40 years ago, when I was observing satellites with my friend Jean Lecacheux of Meudon Observatory, we used to use, instead of the "red herring" label, the following meaning in french : "un chalutier"... in reference to the quite many "soviet trawlers" that used to be spying the US technology at the cold war time - seemingly without especially seeking to hide well themselves !!
Regards
Alain
Western suburbs of Paris (France)
48°.891 N
2°.113 E
altitude 45 m
----Message d'origine----
De: Björn Gimle (GlocalNet)
A: alain.figer@club-internet.fr
Sujet: Re: MetOp-A seemingly a bit late
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 11:47:35 +0200
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_004F_01C7F07B.B748E580"
------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html----- Original Message -----Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 9:10 PMSubject: MetOp-A seemingly a bit lateFrom my place, 2006-044 A MetOp-A passed, on september 4th, 0°2 below the star 11 Per at 19h39m08s UT, that is 21 seconds later than expected from the Heavens-Above charts (for epoch 4sep).
Rather an unusally large time delay.
Regards
Alain
48°.891 N
2°.113 E
altitude 45 m
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