Don Gardner <Mir16609@aol.com> wrote: ] Cosmos 2368 r1 was easily visible at 1x from a well-lit ] parking lot ... at 23:17:50 UTC 21 January. ] It appeared to be flashing at about an 8 second period ] with brightness varying between +1.5 and +2.5. Its pass here last night, culminating about 47 degrees up in the west at 1:02:45 Jan 23 UTC, was also easily visible despite the poor phase angle and some cloud interference. It's tumbling with a broad maximum that I found not easy to time, but I got about 12 seconds. Its height above the surface was about 225 km. C 2368 Molniya-M r1 400 x 213 km 1 26043U 99073B 00023.27016725 .00606075 78870-5 88871-3 0 623 2 26043 62.8063 233.6873 0140445 115.7641 245.7831 15.88555546 4159 Had a good pass of rapidly tumbling ABRIXAS Rk (25723, 99-22C) last night that was quite bright. As it went farther south, it became more and more difficult to see any variation in its brightness even using binoculars. Coincident with SWAS in binoculars I saw a slower-moving nice flasher for which I did not have predictions. It turned out to be UME 2 (10675, 78-18B) flashing to about +4.5 -- more than 1 mag. brighter than predicted using a Quicksat intrinsic mag. of 5.0. (That is to say the maxima were that much brighter than the Quicksat predicted mag. It was invisible between maxima.) Iridiums 24 (25105, 97-82B) and 27 (24947, 97-51D) both did a couple of very bright flashes last night. The first one from Ir 24, at about 00:44:21 UTC seemed to be at least -5. Location about 30.31W, 97.73N, 150m. 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 : Sun Jan 23 2000 - 14:20:26 PST