Once again last night (April 28 UTC) Superbird A (89-041A, 20040) exhibited a long series of maxima up to +5 or very possibly +4.5 quite a while after the main flash episode, every 22.8-seconds. After timing the main episode until about 3:10 UTC, from time to time I looked for it again. Finally, about 3:51, I saw it flash again, and Mike McCants with telescope and I with binoculars observed it for a while. The last flash I timed was at about 4:15:22, and by about 4:18 Mike said it was very faint. It seems to me that this separate Superbird A flash episode is occurring several minutes later each night. (While watching Superbird A, Mike saw a faint presumably geo object tumbling very slowly nearby.) Chinasat 5 (84-049A, 14985) did an interesting flash-flash-miss pattern that we observed from about 4:25 to 4:55. The period is now about 145.5, and the brightest maxima were at least +5 if not +4.5 In his scope Mike saw a couple of the "missed" maxima at an estimated +11.5. Here's a PPAS report on this object: 84- 49 A 01-04-28 04:54:27 EC 1601.0 0.3 11 145.54 mag +4.5->inv Observing location was BCRC: 30.314N, 97.866W, 280m. We took a few minutes off to watch the Moon occult eta Geminorum. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Apr 28 2001 - 02:48:10 PDT