Last night by accident I saw a very bright flash (no binoculars). We waited and waited, and 3 minutes and 13.5 seconds later it flashedagain -- very bright. This was not long after 10:00 PM local time (3:00 UTC). It was LES 8 (73-023A, 08746). It very very gradually got fainter over the next hour (?) -- don't know when it started. This was very easy to see without magnification. The last two evenings AMC-16 (04-048A, 28472), a geosat, has been flaring to +3.5 magnitude near lambda Aquilae (19:06, -4.9, epoch 2000) at about 2:35-40 (9:35-40 PM local time). This is a very long ways (about 75 degrees!) away from the shadow entry position! I just happened to see it by accident on Friday evening while looking at the neat asterism around lambda Aquilae. Last night the satellite was equally bright as the star, and both were visible without binoculars in spite of the moonlight. I've been able to see XM-1 and XM-2 for a long time each evening lately with my 8x binoculars, and the PAS pair low in the east for a few minutes just before shadow entry. Cosmos 2105 (90-099A, 20941) is still flashing very brightly high in the east, kind of around 2:00 UTC (9:00 PM local time -- don't have the exact time at hand at the moment, but it's as it's above and right of the Great Square of Pegasus, as we look to the east). Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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