Last night was a triple-header flyover in twilight as STS-97, Progress M1-4 and the ISS were all easily seen flying over Houston just after local sunset. The interesting thing about this pass is that all objects reached the same brightness of -1.5 at some point in their trajectories. Even with the addition of the large solar arrays, the relative brightness of ISS has not flared up yet to exceed that of Mir at its brightest. Progress is normally +3.5 and when anti-sun, about +2.5. I was really shocked to see it shoot up to -1.5 for about 6 or 8 seconds. All three objects were recorded on video. STS-97 and Progress were separated by 51 seconds, and Progress and ISS separated by 4m 06 seconds in pass time. Paul ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Mon Dec 11 2000 - 04:59:41 PST