On 3-29 (UT), I went outside to look for Shenzhou 3 (~0012 UT; 27397) and its decaying rocket (~0021 UT; 27398). They were not visible in a twilight sky, armed with 7x35's. On 3-30 (UT), I went outside to see the Shenzhou 3 rocket at ~0008 UT. This time, I was successful. It was to make a high pass (~80 degrees elevation), and I made a mad dash to get a chair out. I took my glasses off and hoisted my 7x35's 5 seconds before its maximum elevation. Before putting my eyes to the eyepieces of the binoculars, I saw something bright moving through the bright twilight sky - the Shenzhou 3 rocket. It was about +1 at its peak, and dimmed to about magnitude +2. Its flash period was about 15 seconds. That estimate is made by counting aloud (One-one thousand, two-one thousand, etc.) to 15. I probably should have put my glasses on instead and made a stopwatch timing (my watch is strapped to my wrist). The entire flight was visible, naked-eye. According to SatEvo, and the latest TLE, the rocket will be decaying on 02093.4800 (2002 April 3). About 48 hours earlier, that figure was 02092.9414 (2002 April 2). So, it would appear that after two days of orbital evolution, the Shenzhou 3 rocket will be staying up there another 12 hours, i.e., its orbit is not decaying as fast as expected by the program. I just saw the main spacecraft hauled into orbit by the aforementioned rocket, Shenzhou 3, at about 0032 UT. It was also visible at naked-eye, with a visual magnitude of about +2. I was so pleased to be able to see it. We were supposed to have rain tonight and Saturday night, and clouds on Sunday night, so I knew that after last night's failure, my prospects for seeing the historic spacecraft was in doubt. But I saw it! Thankfully, it was not tumbling or anything like that. Both the rocket and the service/orbital module were on time. As far as I can tell, the orbital module has not been released yet. It has a planned 6 month orbital lifetime. If it is of any relevance, Shenzhou III will decay from its present orbit in about 722 days. Of course, it'll probably be back down on the Earth in about 1% of that. Two down (Shenzhou III and its rocket), one more (orbital module) to go. I set the standard magnitude of 27397 at +3.5, and 27398 at +4.0 in my Satspy visual magnitude config file. The results tonight was that 27397 was ~1.1 visual magnitudes fainter than expected, and 27398 was ~0.6 visual magnitudes fainter than expected. I changed those numbers to both +4.5, and I get +1 for 27398, and +2 for 27397. So, I think +4.5 may be close to the real standard magnitude. 27398 had been estimated by RADAR cross-sectional analyisis to be +4.0. ------------------------------ Jonathan T. Wojack tlj18@juno.com 39.706d N 75.683d W 5 hours behind UT (-5) ***DOZENS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, ASTRONOMY, SKY AND TELESCOPE, AD ASTRA MAGAZINES ARE FOR SALE*** ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Fri Mar 29 2002 - 20:37:45 EST