Last night I managed to observe one flaring geosynch from about UTC 4:59 or 5:00 to 5:07 or 5:08. Conditions weren't very good -- moonlight, a little bit of very thin cloud, and I was in town. I was looking pretty far away from the Moon. The rough positions that I got (2000 RA 6:42, Dec -4.8, at 5:06:45) are not accurate enough to distinguish between GE 8 (26639, 00081B) and Aurora 2 (21392, 91-037A) which are only about half a degree apart. I wonder if Aurora 2 is still operational. The object reached about +5.5 magnitude, similar to a nearby star (6:36:35, -5.21). Another topic. In January 2000 James Husnay, Jr., reported on a TV program called "Space: The Final Junkyard": http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/Jan-2000/0104.html It was broadcast again this week, and I how have cable TV, so I got to see it. It was pretty good. It began with some film of the Delta tank that landed near here in January 1997, followed by film of Paul Maley watching things with his giant binoculars. One thing it made me want to have is an LMT (liquid mirror telescope -- scope+ccd = one million times as sensitive as the human eye -- perhaps out of my price range)! They showed several objects crossing its field. The one on this program is in New Mexico, USA; here's its Web site: http://sn-callisto.jsc.nasa.gov/measure/optical.html Even I might be able to get good positional measurements with one of those! 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 : Sat Mar 10 2001 - 13:31:02 PST