Last night, three very bright (approx. -3, plus or minus) one-power flashes from Iridium 44 (25078, 97-77B), low in the north, well after culmination: March 31 -- 2:50:11.03, 2:50:48.94, 2:51:33.31 UTC Suspected flashes from very nearly geosynch ASC 1 (15994, 85-76C, a known flasher): March 31 -- 3:28:20.29, +2.5 3:46:17.81, +5.5 3:59:40.63, +6.5 (?) I saw them with binoculars. The third was very faint and actually may have been spurious, but I'm mentioning it as it was very near 3/4 of the 17:57.52 elapsed time between the first two. Obviously using handheld binoculars, I could not watch continuously, so there was a definite portion of luck in seeing the first two. After the second flash I tried looking for others at fractions of 17.96 minutes. I tried to find GSTAR 3 again but did not succeed. Iridium 17 predicted -1 flare -- looked for but not seen. However, it was only 14 degrees above the horizon, and at that time the conditions in that direction were unfavorable -- especially the lights from the sports fields two blocks away from my apartment. Location was 30.31N, 97.73W, 150m. Superbird A was still quite low in the sky, which was far from perfect, so I decided to look for Iridium 20 flashes instead -- and did not see any. Here's a kind of odd, probably now obsolete, "Save Iridium" Web site (no date that I could find): http://saveiridium.com 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 31 2000 - 01:14:45 PST