Congratulations to China on a successful launch. Perfect viewing opportunity at 4:17 am local time. 18:17:15 UTC synhronised Ultrak stopwatch to GPS LCD and went outside (yes I left it late to acclimatise!!!). Saw both objects immediately in predicted azimuth / elevation. 18:18:46.90 pressed lap timer as leading object passed a star (from a subsequent check I believe it passed a third of a degree W of i-Carinae). 18:18:55.41 pressed lap timer for second time (ie I make it 8.56 seconds separation). As it was 4:18 am local time, in case I have made a silly error, raw stopwatch data shows first button press at 1 minute 31.90 seconds after 4:17:15 am local time and 1:40.41 for second object. Now here is the interesting part. The trailing object was steady and had a constant illumination - Orbitron estimated +3 but I thought it was brighter than that, say 2.5? The leading object is flashing and tumbling. Just before I took my observation, it flared to around magnitude 0, then disappeared. I assumed it had passed into the earth's shadow and concentrated on watching the trailing body. It remained steady. A little while later, the leading body reappeared and flared, then disappeared. Intrigued, I watched the pair until they dropped below 10 degree elevation and using the counting estimate trick of 1000, 2000, 3000 etc came up with a very rough 21 second period between flare - disappear -----> flare - disappear etc. The GPS sitting next to me gives my position as 35 26.0975 S and 149 degrees 05.2400 E. GPS height is 595 and from memory we are 19.5 metres below the ellipsoid (ie my true height should be 615 m AMSL). Thanks Orbitron and Ted Molczan for predictions. Cheers, Bill Canberra, Australia ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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