Re: UNID
Ed Cannon (edcannonutaustin@netscape.net)
8 Sep 99 04:08:00 CDT
Rainer Kracht (r.kracht@elmshorn.netsurf.de) wrote, in response to my UNID
report:
> UNK990907 e & n set
> 1 90907U 99250.08740308 .00000000 00000-0 00000+0 0 02
> 2 90907 49.3269 278.2608 7000000 307.4638 5.8093 2.00600000 04
Due to my ignorance, I'm not sure how close Rainer's elset is, but I am happy
to report very good fortune the following evening. The weather was good. I
was looking above (west of) a mag. +4 star (RA 21:20, Dec. +19.8, 2000) that
was below (east of) the "second position" from last night, and north of it I
saw two or three faint flashes, +7 at best. I described the position to Mike
McCants as best I could ("It's by that star and near that
other one, and kind of moving that way...."), and on that flimsy basis Mike
acquired it with his 8-inch telescope! He and I then tracked it for 45
minutes or so, during which time it grew fainter and fainter until we could
not see it any longer.
It's in a near-12-hour orbit; it was a few minutes earlier this time. Mike
has the real data and said that he expects to post a search elset later today,
but I'll offer two crude "positions". The method of getting these was setting
two alt-az locations in HomePlanet and then pointing at them to get
HomePlanet's RA & Dec readings! So these two positions are definitely ROUGH!
(I believe that HomePlanet uses 2000 coordinates.)
1999-09-08, 2:20 - RA 21:10, Dec +25.8
1999-09-08, 2:37 - RA 21:40, Dec +39.7
The observing location again was: 30.314N, 97.866W, 280m.
In the telescope it has a definite cycle of a very sharp specular flash
followed by a normal maximum (though this cycle seems to go through a longer
brighter-fainter cycle), but even near the end of the observation session it
was very faintly visible a fair amount of the time between the flash and the
tumble, at least during the brighter parts of the longer bright-faint
variations.
Ed Cannon - Austin, Texas, USA
Please use ecannon@mail.utexas.edu if possible.
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