Getting ready to watch for Iridium 914, with my 10x50s I saw an unexpected flash, maybe about +5 or a little brighter. Soon there was another; it was moving very slowly -- not the Iridium. I almost filled up the remaining memory on my stopwatch with flashes every 12.9 seconds. Now Findsat tells me it was most likely Cosmos 1341 (82-016A, 13080). Almost 15 minutes later, I was getting ready to look for the NOSS 2-1 triangle, and I saw a flash about +5 just above and right of Polaris. I had stopped my stopwatch on click 100 and had not started the other one, so could only note the times on my wristwatch. I watched three or four flashes. It seems that object also was Cosmos 1341! The first flashes were when it was at a range of over 11,500 km. When it went near Polaris, it was close to 8,000 km. Here's a PPAS report on the first obs: 82- 16 A 03-09-07 03:26:45 EC 335.2 0.2 26 12.89 +5.0->inv NOSS 2-1; the outlier was brightest and was faintly visible without binoculars for some seconds. I watched GSTAR 1 (85-035A, 15677) from 1:56:49 until 2:12:09 September 7 UTC. Phase shift was at about 2:05:11. While I watched it, an entire page of Quicksat predictions went ignored. But it's just about to flash too early, going into twilight, since it does it about nine minutes earlier each night. I saw two Raduga 33 (96-010A, 23794) bright flashes, at about 5:30:17.0 and 5:30:50.6. I watched Cosmos 2082 Rk (20625, not currently in the PPAS program list, it seems) for much of its pass -- 90- 46 B 03-09-07 02:43:03 EC 298.7 3.0 19 15.7 +4.0->+6.0 Hubble (90-037B, 20580) did some pretty unusual multiple flares. I wonder what it was doing/pointing at, at about 1:50 Sept 7 UTC. I wonder how many other people saw it. Observing site was Ney Museum, 30.307N, 97.727W, 150m. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Sep 07 2003 - 06:21:41 EDT