Hello from Moscow! We had 4 bright Iridium flares this week, three of them during last 3 hours: -4.7 in Leo at 23:25 Mosow Summer Time (UT+0400), -8.0 in Bootes at 00:42 and -8.4 at 02:18 underneath Lyra! Sky has cleared in the afternoon with scenic sunset and thin cirrus clouds left. First flare was with the Sun only 6 degrees under horizon and I even failed to spot Regulus before the event - Arcturus and Vega were the only stars visible. But the flare of Iridium 31 materialized. No photo was made. Second flare of the night - Iridium 34 - was under the stars Epsilon and Rho Boo and I took a photograph from my "backyard". Minus 8 mag is very impressive even in June though I've seen real bright flares in the darker skies many times before. After searching for fellow satellite observers among ICQ users (are there any on this list?!?) I went out to shoot the last and the best flare of the night and to my surprise found that some idiots have set two litter containers on fire!!! It was too late to go searching for a darker place so I set up my tripod and made the exposure blocking the camera from the sparks with my own self. :-) Still enjoyed the huge Iridium 56 flare right underneath Beta and Gamma Lyrae with the satellite having passed between them in 10 seconds after the peak. In two minutes and a half Cosmos 1043 Rocket almost followed Iridium's path but was moving faster and didn't score the goal (I mean those two stars). :-) It was also photographed but I don't expect anything interesting on Kodak 400 film with its mag of 3-3.5. No need to mention that while I was taking the last exposure, firemen car arrived which have added more light to the landscape. :-) Well, let's wait for images to get processed and printed. We have another triade of -3, -8 and -7 mag flares during one night of June 20/21 (at 00:21, 01:57 and 03:34 MST) - again in 5 days from now just like the previous trio of Iridium 59, 8 and 12 on June 10/11 (the second flare of which was observed by Igor Lissov). The scanned photos will appear on http://hea.iki.rssi.ru/~denis/iridmsk.html as usual. Clear skies, Den --- ICQ # 5538455 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Fri Jun 15 2001 - 16:30:56 PDT