Hello, > Last evening clouds rolled in that were dense enough to totally > obscure the moon but had enough openings to catch the end of > the pass. At 20:49 EDT (00:49 UTC, 18 April) Atlantis led the > ISS by about 7 seconds or about 3 degrees of arc. They were > descending in the due south at an elevation of about 40 > degrees. Both were about -2 mag. I saw the same pass a bit north of you. I was also able to get a telescopic lock onto both the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, at 47x. The Space Shuttle was a ball of whitish light - it was featureless. The ISS, on the other hand, was yellowish, appeared slightly brighter than STS-110, and definitely showed structure !! I could make out the solar panels/truss structures. This is the most plainly obvious I've seen structure on the ISS. I could visually, through the eyepiece, distinguish between the Orbiter and the Space Station. Twice, realizing that I had the Shuttle in the eyepiece, I waited, and several seconds later the ISS showed up. Both objects were following the same arc across the sky. Question: ignoring the obvious answer (they were both joined recently), did both objects essentially follow the same path across the sky because they both crossed the equator at the same angle (38.4d; the supplemental (or complemental, I can't remember which) angle to the angle of inclination), and at about the same point and time? After seeing the pass, I suddenly had a vision of sorts concerning the mathematics of orbital mechanics. I then began to consider what conditions had to exist for to objects to follow the same path across the sky. Just because I saw the two spacecrafts pass by, I understood things I had never understood before.... Would I be correct in calculating that the diamter of the Earth is assumed to be 12,827.5 kilometers (or 7970.6 miles) ? ------------------------------ Jonathan T. Wojack tlj18@juno.com 39.706d N 75.683d W 4 hours behind UT (-4) ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Apr 18 2002 - 17:14:55 EDT