Well... that was interesting! My first daylight STS reentry. I got home from work about 5:30 pm CST and turned on NASA TV to see if the landing went well. I found to my surprize STS was over the Pacific just reentering. At the same time I got a phone call from my friend and fellow satellite observer Ron Dawes. He used to live here in Texas, but is now with Lockheed in Geogia. He said the reentry plot would pass a bit north of me. I looked around the corner at the TV and the NASA channel had the reentry plot on the screen. I saw STS wound pass just north of Austin within about 15 minutes. I figured that would be about 5 minutes after sundown local time, but I have not confirmed the true local sunset time or the time of STS passage. Fortunately, the total cloud cover had blown off to the south a few hours earlier. My wife and I watched NASA TV until the track crossed the Texas border, then we went into the front yard. About 90 seconds later I picked up STS about 15 degrees above the horizon at about 330 azimuth. It was about as bright as Venus and going like **** toward the east. It culminated about 20 degrees and was so easily visible that my non-astronomer wife had no trouble seeing it. I watched in binoculars as it went down in the NE. The sky was darker there, away from the sunset, and at about azimuth 30 I could begin to detect a faint ion trail following the glowing orbiter. It was very faint, but my wife commented that with the naked eye she could also see a streak behind the orbiter. All this happened between 5 and 10 minutes after local sundown. When the orbiter dropped below the trees, we went back inside and NASA TV was showing an image of the orbiter as seen from JSC in Houston. The orbiter was at 190,000 feet and doing about 10,000 mph then. It had travelled from Austin/San Antonio to Houston in the time it took us to enter the living roon from the front walkway. Amazing! Robert Reeves http://www.connecti.com/~rreeves 520 Rittiman Rd. rreeves@connecti.com San Antonio, TX 210-828-9036 78209 U.S.A. 29.484N 98.440W 200 meters ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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