Last night (early April 19 UTC) we had a very nice sky! Using binocs, I started watching just a bit late but saw several flashes of Superbird A at 3:01:00 to 3:02:30. The possible anomaly I'm wondering about is that I saw more +6 Superbird A flashes about 20 minutes later and then again about 30 minutes after the main flash period! At 3:02:46.2 there was a slow, bright flash just southeast of Superbird A. Gorizont 24 was pretty near but was not in the correct location, I believe. The best candidate seems to be Chinasat 5 (Spacenet 1), which is an AS 3000 like GSTAR 1, GSTAR 3, Yuri 3A, and Yuri 3B -- all known flashers. I watched for two or three minutes a few more times but did not see another flash in the Superbird A/Gorizont 24/Galaxy 2 vicinity. (Galaxy 2 is another known flasher but is a spin-stabilized object with period of something over two seconds and so doesn't fit a slow flash.) Chinasat 5 1 14985U 84049A 01107.78460619 .00000000 00000-0 10000-3 0 7365 2 14985 3.9810 76.6898 0003148 312.2245 47.8515 0.99983734 39407 Two of the three NOSS 2-3 objects were visible at one power (at least +3.5 at brightest) for much of their pass. The leader was the faintest one. HST did a brief -2 to -3 flare; hadn't seen it at all in at least a couple of months (or a lot longer due to weather). 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://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Apr 19 2001 - 02:40:33 PDT