miserable failure

From: Ed Cannon (ecannon@mail.utexas.edu)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 07:18:36 EDT

  • Next message: Michael Gill: "RE: Decaying Raduga 33 (OIG)"

    Last night we saw Raduga 33 very well.  I caught it with
    8x42 way down near Sirius, and for a while in the WSW it
    was visible without binoculars, then on over above and
    right of Polaris it did a couple of very bright flashes.
    Mike said it was running between predictions generated 
    using Int3 elements and SCC elements.
    
    So this morning there was a very good Raduga 33 pass a 
    while ago, but due to operator error I failed to see it.  
    I guess I was too tired.  I was disoriented and mistook 
    Vega for Arcturus, although I had roughly the right 
    altitude and azimuth.  I had myself confused with 
    different predictions.  Then I was distracted by an 
    object that appeared from roughly the right place but 
    didn't look right and turned out to be going too slowly 
    and the wrong direction.  Apparently it was Thor 2A Rk1 
    (24809, 97-25B, a Delta).  Besides the above factors, 
    when I first got there some police were nearby doing 
    something -- that spooked me a little.  Later by a small 
    pedestrian bridge over a creek I heard sounds that I 
    thought were animals and then thought I smelled food and 
    finally saw some subtle flickering light so that I 
    realized someone had a small campfire going under the 
    bridge.  So anyway, "You can't win them all."
    
    Last night I had three unrelated objects at once in the 
    FOV of the 8x42: COMETS (25175, 98-011A) going west to 
    east, Cosmos 2082 (20624, 90-046A), and EGP (16908, 
    86-061A), more slowly west to east than COMETS.  
    
    Earlier, two one-power Zenits, one northbound and the
    other southbound, had a very close conjunction in the
    ENE.
    
    Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA
    
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