> My young son and I watched as the ISS and STS-111 passed over head > last > evening. According to Heavens above it was to be a mag -1.9 > combined pass. > They didn't account for the cargo bay flood lights that were on > bright. Pass > started at 22:35 EDT at the Mag expected. About half way through > the pass, > The flood lights in the cargo bay became visible. If I had to > guess, I would > say at least mag -5.0 or brighter. I was amazed to see such a > bright > display. Maybe I'm wrong (please correct me if I am), but I believe you saw a flaring from ISS/STS-111. If I remember correctly, the floodlights shine at ~ magnitude +6. If their brightness increased to -5, that would be an increase of ~ 400x in intensity. Because of this, I believe it was a flare. And such flares typically occur midway into a pass. I saw a similar phenomenon on Monday night, with the complex flaring to -3. On Tuesday night, I saw the thing through my telescope. I could definitely see structure! It was huge! I couldn't get a clean look because it was a very high altitude pass (i.e., a high rate of angular speed), and when it got down to the lower altitudes - and lower angular rates - it went behind the clouds. --------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan Wojack tlj18@juno.com ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/sat/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jun 25 2002 - 20:50:33 EDT