As Dennis Jones previously posted, The ISS and the Mir made visible passes in the eastern USA last evening. The ISS rose in the NW at 23:59 UTC, 23 February. As it approached Cassiopeia its brightness was about -1.5, not quite as bright as Jupiter. I picked it up with my 6" dob as it passed near alp-Gemini (90az, 60el) at 00:01:40 UTC, 24 February. It looked very different that my last good pass - prior to Destiny. It appeared to be as a small disk/sphere about the same size as Jupiter (~ 40 sec of arc). Perhaps my diffraction spikes are now converging :-). Also - it was a light blue color. The new solar panels must have been shielded by the ISS. The Mir passes just below Venus (270az, 20el) at 00:28 UTC, 24 February. It reached no more than +2.0 mag. TiPS passed just to the right of eps-Cassiopeia at 02:07 UTC. For the 20 seconds or so that I tracked it with the dob I saw the tether for only a 1-2 second period. It's still there. Part of the fun of observing TiPS is watching the tether and the 2 end objects fade in and out. It's definitely one of the flakier objects in LEO. Cheers, Don Gardner 39.1799 N, 76.8406 W, 100m ASL http://hometown.aol.com/mir16609/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Sat Feb 24 2001 - 13:56:07 PST