Observation of #23844 decay
Alan Pickup (alan@wingar.demon.co.uk)
Tue, 23 Apr 1996 18:32:33 +0100
Yesterday, I received the following message from Adam Sunshine
(Adam.Sunshine@CAS.honeywell.com) of the Saguaro Astronomy Club:
>On the night of April 13-14, about 50 amateur astronomers gathered at
>Sentinel, AZ (about 30 miles W of Gila Bend) for our annual Sentinel
>Stargaze (very dark site!). Just after midnight, we observed a
>re-entry of something, actually two objects with the second in the
>tail of the first. Determined to find out what it was, I came across
>your prediction of the decay of Object # 23844 on the web page of
>SeeSat-L. Plugging your tle's into my copy of SatSpy, there was a
>nice plot at the exact time & place of the observation. Wish I had
>known about it beforehand, could have gotten a great video of it.
>Thanks for the posting.
>Adam Sunshine
>Saguaro Astronomy Club
>Properties Officer
Initially I took this as confirmation that the decay had occurred
shortly after 0600 UT (April 14.25), however Adam has corrected me
as follows:
>Feel free to post my observation to SeeSat-L. However, the time
>of re-entry was just after 0700 UT (Arizona does not observe
>Daylight Savings Time), which is a close match to your earlier
>prediction of April 14.3. By my calculations, midnight local
>time would be 14.29166, so the appearance of the component at 12:03
>local (according to SatSpy for Windows) fits in nicely with your
>prediction of 14.3.
Does anyone know of other observations of this event?
Alan
--
Alan Pickup | Home lat. 55d53m48.7s N | Royal Observatory, Blackford
Edinburgh | long. 3d11m51.2s W | Hill, Edinburgh EH9 3HJ
Scotland | alan@wingar.demon.co.uk | A.Pickup@roe.ac.uk
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