Last night after briefly trying to see EUVE, I turned to look for USA 86 (22251, 92-83A), and I definitely found it! It took me a couple of seconds to be convinced that the -1 object was it, but it was. Then after a couple of more seconds I started my stopwatch. It maxed at least as bright as Sirius and continued brighter than zero for about 40 more seconds. Then it fairly quickly faded to +3 as it continued to the north. The stopwatch times were: start, 1:49:05.5; stop, 1:49:45.2 March 10 UTC. Location was outside my apartment -- 30.3086N, 97.7279W, 150m. Not as spectacular as Dan Deak's super flare a few days ago, but a nice one for sure. Iridium 14 (24836, 97-30A) did quite a few one-power flashes, and in binoculars it was pretty chaotic. I'm not sure what to make of the times I got. After Seasat (10967, 78-64A) maxed at about +1, I looked for Lacrosse 3 (25017, 97-64A), and it turned out that they went within a few degrees of each other, both about +2.5. Two Long March rockets made tumbling one-power appearances -- "CZ-3A Rk" (24799, 97-21B) and DFH-3 Rk (23416, 94-80B). The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn were in a very nice right triangle! There had been considerable clouds early, but it cleared off pretty well early enough to see satellites, obviously. 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 : Fri Mar 10 2000 - 02:28:28 PST