I live on the Big Island of Hawaii near South Point at the 3500 ft elevation and have been making visual satellite observations for several weeks now as a result of community murmur. For the past several weeks, I and others with me have counted between 4 and 14 easily visible sightings with the naked eye within an hour of each sunset and sunrise. The objects appear to have reflected light only, traversing the heavens with a magnitude of -1 to +6. Sometimes these objects are only visible for a few seconds and other times they traverse half the sky in about a minute. 90 minutes after sunset or before sunrise they are no longer visible. Usually they appear overhead and travel towards the horizon. They often appear to weave back and forth slightly but this could be due to atmospheric effects. I have seen two change direction. One aprox. 90 deg and one 180 deg in less then a second. They can traverse a fist held at arms length in 3 to 10 seconds. I am curious as are others. Are these normal naked eye visual sightings of satellites, or are we all seeing things? Just how many could be seen from one location at sunrise or sunset and how fast would a low earth orbit satellite traverse the heavens from horizon to horizon? Any replies would be appreciated and I won't bother you again. Aloha, Ukulele ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Wed Feb 09 2000 - 13:08:55 PST