Thank you very much to Gerald Holtkamp, who wrote: "some geostationary satellites will experience a solar eclipse on 28-FEB-06. <...> "Observers in America (North and South) can see some GEOs around 102 West experiencing an annular solar eclipse DIRECTV 8 (2005-019A ; #28659; 100.7W) at 5:01 UT DIRECTV 1-R (1999-056; #25937; 100.8W) at 5:01 UT GE4 (1999-060A; #259549; 101.0W) at 5:02 UT DIRECTV 4S (2001-052A ; #26985; 101.1W) at 5:02 UT SPACEWAY 1 (2005-015A ; #28644; 102.8W) at 5:07 UT GE-1 (1996-054A; #24315; 103.0W) at 5:08 UT "Expect a drop in magnitude of about 2.5. The overall partial phase will last half an hour." Feb. 28 falls within "flaring geosat season" for quite a bit of the northern hemisphere, so some of the objects above, which are in a tightly packed group, may be brighter than normal part of the time. (These are near our meridian, so their actual flaring time is around local true midnight, which is roughly 90 minutes later than the solar eclipse. But I tend to think it would be an interesting night to try to observe them, right around the times above.) Now if only we can shake the recent cloudy weather.... Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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