I will combine this with my introduction. I became interested in the space programme before satellites were launched- I recall seeing the original Sputnik and kept a scrapbook of articles on the plans for the astronaut program when it was something way in the future- unfortunately the scrapbook has been lost with time. Excuse me mentioning non-visual observations for one moment as my interest in visual observation was rekindled by amateur radio communication via satellites including a brief contact with Viktor on board MIR. I no longer do amateur radio as the Internet seems to have taken over for me, and have followed several shuttles on NASA-TV. I observed STS-107 from my location Wainuiomata. New Zealand: 41.261 S 174.947W in the evening sky for approximately 1 minute at 0859 UTC on Jan 25 2003. Sky was quite cloudy but there was a clear patch which allowed the observation. Though I am a novice at this I suspect that the magnitude was higher than predicted by Heavens Above- that site appears to be having server problems at present but I think it said about -1.2. The object was quite bright and steady with no noticable flicker. It seems reliable that it was STS-107 from the ground-track on Heavens Above and no other objects were predicted at that time. If anyone can show otherwise I would welcome the information! It was noticeable that the map on the NASA spaceflight beta tracker showed it over my location after I had LOS, - could this could be owing to lag over the Internet? I will be looking at the coordinates more closely to see if this might be the case as we have a similar though slightly lower pass today- though I am not optimistic at this stage owing to cloud. It was more useful to watch the tracker and camera on NASA-TV together with the Heavens-Above prediction and the "View from Satellite" site at http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/satellite.html Robert Holdsworth Wainuiomata, New Zealand. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Sat Jan 25 2003 - 15:16:16 EST