Unidentified Bright Flaring Satellite

Jake Rees (jrburca@worldnet.att.net)
Sun, 1 Aug 1999 08:19:50 -0700 

Hi all,

I didn't have a list of visible satellites, binoculars, or watch.  Just to
take a glance at the pre-dawn sky in hopes of seeing a meteor or something
interesting, I stepped outside Sunday morning.  Facing south, I looked up
and noticed a bright satellite gradually getting brighter going generally
west-to-east passing a few degrees south of Jupiter.  My first thought was
'Ah, TRMM!', but then thought I had never seen it flare.  Trying to
remember, and reconstructing details afterwards, the gradual brightening
peaked when it was at or near a point (Az.137, El. 57) where the satellite
formed an equallatoral triangle with Saturn and Jupiter, the unknown
satellite being at the most southeasterly point of that triangle.  I noted
that the peak brightness was somewhere between the brightness of Jupiter and
that of Saturn.  If pressed, I'd say it was about midway in brightness
between Jupiter and Saturn.  Then over the next several seconds it gradually
faded to invisibility.  I watched for a few seconds to see if it would flare
again.  It didn't look as if it would so I rushed in to look at the clock
which read 5:22:__ AM PDT (12:22 UTC).  From reconstucting, travelling
west-to-east, my guess is that it had culminated close to due south
(Az.170-190), El. 60-70 perhaps at 12:20:30-12:22:00 UTC 01 Aug. 1999 or
close to that, previous to my initially acquiring it.

It was a relatively slow mover which reminded me of a similar pace as an
Iridium.  Obviously its path was perpindicular to those of Iridiums so it
was not an Iridium.  Further checking revealed that TRMM was nowhere near my
location at that time.  Looking at the GSOC site, I saw no candidates.

I downloaded mccants.tle from Mike McCants' site.  Using Rob Matson's SkyMap
as a search filter, no likely candidates came up.  Then I downloaded
alldat.tle (alldat.zip) and got the same result with the search.  The only
ones that came up in the search were Iridium 56 (too late) and Cosmos 1842
both going on tracks perpindicular to the track to my unknown so no near
matches at all.

So I am stumped and wonder if anybody can identify it or if perhaps I've
seen an uncataloged satellite.

--  Jake Rees
     Burbank, California, USA
     (34.177, -118.352, 190 meters)