Greetings group: Last night's skies once again kept me from going after asteroids in my telescope, so I used my binoculars to spot a few satellites. I tracked a few in my 7x35mms, and 20x80mms. When I use my bino's in this fashion, I like to choose a constellation to see what might pass by. Using my mounted 20x80mms, I spotted and tracked Thorad Aegna D for about 2m30s. Predicted Mv 8.8, this was first seen tumbling in and out of view from about Mv 9.5 to invisible. This tumbling stopped and the sat brightened to about Mv 8.0, then it began to fade and tumble once again. Mostly likely quite normal for satellite debris. But at the time I did not know it was debris, as GUIDE 8.0 did not list it as such. A nice unexpected show to make up for "asteroid useless" skies. My recent tries for asteroids in the 14.5Mv range are lost to hazy skies. While I may never submit positional observations to the group, I was wondering what infomation there might be on this object. This must be some hardware needed to orbit the main sat, but is there a way to tell how large this might be? It puts on good show when the angles are right for sure. I spotted Lacrosse 5 a few nights ago but with no unexpected results. Clear Skies Lawrence Garrett ALPO Minor Planet Section Assistant Coordinator lsgasteroid@msn.com MAP Alert Homepage http://mysite.verizon.net/vze105aij/map/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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