Good morning - though at the moment I feel like a bear that has had its hibernation disturbed- feeling very fuzzy. Despite cloudy weather I was able to observe something - at the moment Im not sure if it was the STEREO spacecraft or the rocket. The predictions from HORIZON are a little confusing - they are still using the initial lift-off time/parameters etc and it seems the rocket was leading the spacecraft -which seems wrong to me. For example: Time(i) STEREO rocket Time(c) (UT) az el az el 01h08m 14.3210 26.0319 16.0443 26.2817 01h22m 01h09m 23.7649 30.2793 25.5813 30.3765 01h23m 01h10m 32.8417 33.3048 34.6769 33.2402 01h24m Time(i) above is uncorrected time- ie have to add 14m because launched 14 minutes into the window. Done = (Time(c)). If Im thinking (!) correctly then the rocket was leading STEREO by about less than 2 degrees. Due to cloud I started tracking blindly on the predictions for STEREO and managed to see "something" several times. Here are three positions Ive measured so far Time UT RA Dec az el 01h21m39.3 05h46m59.8s +30d05'07" 12.969 24.690 01h21m42.4 05h48m45.0s +29d44'15" 13.461 24.947 01h21m59.2 05h58m21.8s +27d49'58" 16.238 26.286 From this I conclude that I was tracking the rocket. At the last position I was already tracking on the object so was operating at maximum "sensitivity" and the field of view started at azimuth 13.76 deg and covered 24.0 to 28.2 degrees so should have included STEREO at about az 14.32 el 26.03 deg. Looking at this location in the image I see nothing so either Ive done something wrong or the STEREO satellites were fainter than about 10th magnitude. The object tracked was about mag +8.5 and varying slowly in brightness. I have still to do more measuring but my conclusion is that I saw the rocket but not the STEREO satellites. The latest is that tracking data from Canberra and Madrid show that all is well and as planned. (quote from my "on the scene reporter" :-)) >> considering where the spacecraft have been recently. Now the orbit >> estimates are nailed to the wall, as we say, and we're done for the >> night. Back tomorrow for the L+24 hr solutions! Cheers Greg ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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