Just back from a winterholliday in Austria. The snow was good. Almost every day (night) there was some snowfall. Good for the skiing, but bad for observing satellites. I could not do any useful observing. The evening we left for Austria, 11 februari, I 've seen the shuttle and the ET. Watching CNN I saw the launch at 17:40 UT; 15 minutes later I went outside and start looking for the shuttle and the ET. At 18:01 I saw two bright lights appear in the northwest, moving fast to the north to an elevation of about 60 degrees. The object highest in the sky was shining white at mag -3; the lower object (about half the moon's diameter distance) was clearly reddish. So I suppuse that this was the ET, based on the colour of the isolation of the ET. After half a minute I saw three 'clouds' appear round the ET; at a regular 120 degrees. They gradually got bigger and become also diffuser. About a minut later the were almost gone. The colour of the ET became more reddish as it came into the earthshadow. Then the shuttle also become reddish as it got into the earthshadow. And soon thereafter both the ET and Shuttle faded out and became invisible. It was a nice sight seeing the shuttle and the ET. Can someone explain what the clouds where I saw around the ET? Perhaps this was already discussed on Seesat-L but I've been unsubscribed for two weeks. Greetings and clear, dark skies Leo Barhorst 52.767 N 5.09 E 2 m ASL ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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