This is to propose a sort of "ETS 6" watch. I found another "What did I see?" anecdote on a Web site -- last August 15 a person in upstate New York saw a flashing light in the southern sky at around 10:00 p.m. local time. There was a matching ETS 6 pass. This must be one of the most frequent unidentified flashing objects accidentally sighted these days. But I think that it must be at least potentially predictable. Based on the previous two evening passes (when I was in San Antonio), Tuesday evening here I looked (one-power) for it (from outside my apartment, terrible site) when it was going to be at around azimuth 200, more or less. For a couple of minutes I didn't see it, and then flash! -- as bright as Rigel. There were eight more one-power flashes, with four or five being pretty close to +0; the last two were definitely fainter. One evening last October during a star party around here it did many one-power flashes for an hour or more as it gradually moved across the southern sky. Currently, it's making evening prime-time, near-perigee passes over the USA: Jan. 7, 10, 13, etc. (local time). And the passes are fairly near to Orion, which increases the chances of accidental sightings by constellation watchers, M42 photographers, etc. (It's also making early morning passes over the USA.) Given good weather, if some persons in various widely separated locations watched the same pass for one-power flashes, we might get some data that could be used towards predicting its one-power flash episodes. You could be watching 97-68B or 90907 (Please!) or even old Gorizont 23 -- or Starshine -- in your telescope or binoculars, but you could get someone else to stare at the southern sky looking for ETS 6. "Just watch up there for a while and tell me if you see anything unusual." (There's some chance they might see Telstar 401 also!) ETS 6 1 23230U 94056A 00006.25128890 -.00000122 00000-0 10000-3 0 7094 2 23230 13.7605 306.9315 5040279 129.5772 287.2121 1.67089180 32818 Here's its record on Encyclopedia Astronautica: http://www.friends-partners.org/~mwade/chrono/19943.htm#4657 Oh, by the way, in order to get Highfly to give me predictions for ETS 6 without swamping me with many pages of fainter objects, I have set its intrinsic magnitude to -5. 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 : Thu Jan 06 2000 - 23:18:37 PST