RE: Gorizont 14 , 16 (simultanous request!) and Raduga 27

From: Khan Abdul-AAK011 (Abdul.Khan@motorola.com)
Date: Sat Feb 01 2003 - 10:35:34 EST

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    Just saw on cnn this guy from Texas ready with his family to watch shuttle re entry. He reports that he saw something like an aircraft seeing "awfully close" to the shuttle and the big sonic boom. Cnn guy immediately discounted it as no aircraft can go up that high 200k feet. Strange!
    
     -----Original Message-----
    From: 	Kurt Jonckheere
    Sent:	Sat Feb 01 09:27:11 2003
    To:	''Seesat-L' '
    Cc:	Wils Patrick
    Subject:	Gorizont 14 , 16 (simultanous request!) and Raduga 27
    
    hello,
    
    Thursday evening I tried 3 geostationary flashers and all of them
    were easily found and flashing bright enough to be visible with
    binoculars, magnitude +7 or brighter at max.
    
    Raduga 27 = 91- 14 A = 21132
    
    period is still going down nicely, easy with binoculars :
    03-01-04 21:14 KJ  69.33
    03-01-04 21:23 LB  69.34
    03-01-08 19;24 KJ  68.91
    03-01-08 20:10 KJ  68.91
    03-01-08 20:36 LB  68.91
    03-01-10 20:18 LB  68.67
    03-01-30 22:35 KJ  65.87
    (obs of Leo and I)
    
    Gorizont 14 = 87- 40 A = 17969
    
    Period was 87.105s on Dec 26, 2002.  Now it is 86.79s, so going down during
    the winter as expected (see
    http://users.skynet.be/satimage/bwgs/kj/gorizont.htm)
    
    From now onwards it is also visible from the East coast of America and will
    become visible from e.g. Texas beginning of next week.  So again we can try
    to make simultanous obs of this one.
    
    While observing the sharp maxima of around +5 with my 8 inch Dibsonian,
    I noticed that around 10 seconds before the real maxima it become visible
    at around mag +13, slowly brightning till around +11, then giving the flash
    of +5 and again slowly fading over about 10 seconds to become invisible
    again.
    
    I had never noticed this before, probably I had a favourable orientation so
    see
    also diffuse flashes ?  Also at other times during the long period it became
    brighter than +13.  A secundary halfway maximum of mag +11 was also seen.
    
    So some surface is giving round long diffuse maxima every half period and a
    sharp flash is seen every full period.
    
    Gorizont 16 = 88- 71 A = 19397
    
    Patrick Wils, Belgium sent me an obs of this one two weeks ago, so
    I checked the PPAS(see below) and found only a limited number of obs
    showing an slowly increasing period, but till now it was never observed
    during winter when other Gorizonts are usually accelerating.
    
    Now comparing my period of 98.36 seconds with Patricks obs of 98.53
    shows again that Gorizont 16 might obey the seasonal variations...
    
    To be checked !!
    
    This one is drifting westwards by one degree a day, and is also becoming
    visible from US in the next weeks.  As the drift is pretty slow we have
    more time to try simultanous obs of this one.  Currently around 22h also
    an easy binoculars object from here.
    
    I could again see a diffuse max and secundary max of around +11.5.
    
    88- 71 A 00-07-22 MM  93.5 sm
    88- 71 A 00-07-30 SDL 93.58 dT=2433.1
    88- 71 A 00-07-31 SDL 93.59 dT=2556.6
    88- 71 A 00-08-02 SDL 93.62 dT=2995.8
    88- 71 A 00-08-03 EC  93 6->inv
    88- 71 A 00-08-04 SDL 93.66 dT=2716.3
    88- 71 A 00-08-06 SDL 93.67 dT=3372.2 mag 5->inv.
    88- 71 A 00-08-07 SDL 93.69 dT=2717.1 mag 5->inv.
    88- 71 A 01-05-23 MM  94.35
    88- 71 A 02-04-01 EC   95.77  +7->inv
    88- 71 A 03-01-11  PW 98.53 +6->inv
    88- 71 A 03-01-30 KJ 98.36
    Observations of Mike McCants, Ed Cannon, Stephen Delalumondiere, Patrick
    Wils, Kurt Jonckheere.
    
    in PPAS :
    87- 40 A 03-01-30 21:47:28.5 KJ 1215.0 .15  14 86.79  mag +4 ->inv
    91- 14 A 03-01-30 22:35:15.9 KJ 1317.5 0.1  20 65.874 mag +7 ->inv
    88- 71 A 03-01-30 22:28:24.7 KJ 1573.8 0.4  16 98.36  mag +7->inv
    
    Regards,
    
    Kurt
    
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