Ron Welch of Australia has discovered that Spacenet 3R (88-018A, 18951), a drifting geosynch, is flashing with a period of about 32.86 seconds, with the episodes being about 10 minutes later each night and lasting roughly between 15 and 25 minutes. The brightest flashes were at least +3.0 magnitude. Tony Beresford has already added it to his geoflsh file: http://home.iprimus.com.au/aberesford/tle/geoflsh.txt I believe this is the same type of satellite as other flashing ones such as GSTAR 1 and 3; it's called either GE 3000 or AS 3000 -- if either of those is current. I meant to mention a week or two ago that there are several eyewitness reports of the March 15 (local time) Vandenburg launch at this URL: http://www.msatech.com/nuforc/webreports/ndxe200203.html The locations are NV, AZ, and CA with times around 18:__ (Pacific time) and 19:__ (Mountain) and one from CA mistakenly entered as 06:25 (but was really 6:25 PM Pacific). I find it very interesting to read reports by people who did not know what it was they were seeing. In late August or early September 1967 I saw one of these in evening twilight from south central Los Angeles, California. I didn't have any idea what it was, but fortunately one of the group of us who were looking at it did know. It was certainly an amazing, awesome sight! Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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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