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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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