Last night (9 Jan 02) while watching Iridium 42 flare to -2 as predicted by Heavens-above (19:02:29 local time or 00:02:29 UTC), I saw a much brighter flare right next to it in the sky which appeared to be from a nearby Iridium satellite that was not predicted by Heavens-above. The second flare was at least -6 magnitude, was above and slightly to the left of the first flare, and followed the same track (heading south toward the horizon). Although it peaked about 5 seconds later than the first flare, they were both visible at the same time. It was really an amazing sight to see both flares right next to each other (their separation was less than the separation of the stars in Orion's belt), especially as bright as the second flare was. I didn't think that two operational Iridium satellites would be so close together -- aren't there 11 satellites spread out evenly in one orbital plane? Could the second have been a spare? If so, could the spare be close to becoming operational to replace Iridium 42? My understanding was that the spare Iridiums are not always nadir-oriented like the operational satellites, and it seems to me to be too much of a coincidence that the spare happened to be oriented just like the operational satellite. - Kevin Mangis 38.87N, 77.31W (Fairfax, Virginia) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 10 2002 - 17:22:47 EST