I trained my own 10" Meade reflector on the shuttle this evening from Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada (45.885 -64.368): great view! At 92x and hand-tracked (somewhat difficult when it crossed my FOV in 0.6 seconds!) saw impressive detail. Shuttle looked bright and elongated, with a very sharp and nearly as bright "rod" projecting perpendicular to the direction of travel, very approximately 0.5 arc minutes long (see artistic impression at:) http://www.geocities.com/tylermatic/images/shuttle.gif Length of the boom and shuttle were about the same, probably because my angle to the boom was only about 31 degrees (max elevation 27 deg). Saw NO bright object at end of boom (radar). Followed shuttle until shadow entry at 1420km range and 4deg elev). Boom appeared to grow compared to shuttle as angle got wider with distance. Finally, FOLLOWING end of shuttle looked larger?/brighter than leading end, almost looking like the tail. However, I believe the leading end is the tail and the brighter trailing end is the sunlit cockpit. Any ideas? I reiterate Frank Reed's suggestion to go out and see this before it comes down. And thanks Frank for being so enthusiastic and convincing me to try! -Tyler MacKenzie Sackville NB Canada >This was an EASY observation. If you have access to a telescope, I highly >recommend taking a look. I've tracked Mir and the shuttles on previous >occasions but never seen such clear evidence of structure. > >-Frank E. Reed >Chicago, IL ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Thu Feb 17 2000 - 16:42:09 PST
