Bjorn & List : Wow , this really has been an incredible learning experience for me . This daytime sighting had me scrambling , and then some . Last night , in a Paint program ,while I waited for the skies to clear I began to try and map out approx where that area "should" be , and which resulting sats were in that approx area . I caught myself in another mistake however , when I forgot how many degrees a fist at arms length was . Once again I had to google it and of course the answer is "around 10 degrees" . The total lack of any flare sightings recently has somehow erased that part of my memory, ... again . For some reason I had 5 degrees stuck in my head so when I initially reported that flash's location , I did so incorrectly . It was around 20 degrees towards the horizon , not 10 . Using that as a starting point to drop 20 degrees I did another search in Satflare but much tighter this time . Choose 8 degrees, and two Cosmos sats were suggested , but the one (COSMOS 1778) was a minute or so out of the area as it was moving very rapidly . Turned out that COSMOS 1651 was very close to that hypothetical sector , but I would have to get back out when skies cleared to make sure that the hypothetical matched the practical . Skies finally cleared tonight and I was able to re-use my "2 fists toward the horizon from the midpoint of the line between Altair & Arcturus" method and discovered exactly where that resulting area was and which stars it actually involved . 45 minutes later that the initial UTC and performed that odd looking hand waving and after many attempts at trying to memorize the stars , so that I could get back to Satflare's SkyChart and do the final sleuthing to see if I had a winner or just a freak unexplained event at the end of a bad day , I crossed my eyes, I mean my fingers , and headed back home . So , anyway , if you look at this very busy image (sorry about that) http://www.studiodynamics.net/moon/satflaregrab.gif (112 KB) you will see that yes indeed , my crude initial geometry confirmed that COSMOS 1651 was within 4-6 degrees of where the elaborate calculations (using Satflare & a Paint Program) said it should be . Those splined lines I drew turned out to look very much as the real night sky looked , with the intersecting line between Altair & Arcturus passing between the upper Sarin and lower Ras Algethi & Ras Alhague . Sounds like bull , I'm sure . I mean , how can a human , at dusk, just use 2 far apart stars , his hands & some crazy right angles to determine where a possible flash may have originated from space , but I assure you it is all true, not just severe wishful thinking . Not sure why it was so much fun , but it really was . Thanks for your time , cheers, gc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/private/seesat-l/attachments/20120910/e6607a76/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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