Hello to all, Yesterday evening I realised amazed that at around 19:48 local time a tripple pass of Discovery->Soyus-> and ISS starts, and this in less than 30 seconds seperation. So I rushed out, grapped the car and drove down to the St Kilda Beach (170.513E 45.903S +/-250m), where it is a bit darker by the dunes. I arrived in time and with the sun just about 11 deg. below the horizon, the sky in the West was still a bit glowing. Discovery came very nice from the South West and ‘climbed’ the sky trailed by the ISS, couldn’t see Soyus because forgot the binocs and it was to close to the ISS, Heavens-above: STS-102 -0.2 19:47:30 10deg SW 19:50:30 38deg SSE Soyus 3.8 19:47:57 10deg SW 19:51:02 39deg SSE ISS 0.3 19:47:58 10deg SW 19:51:03 39deg SSE Then suddenly at 19:50:12 +/-3 sec the leading Discovery flared for about 1 second, from the normal about 0 magnitude to –5 or –6, the flaring was instantly, not like the Iridia with increasing and decreasing brightness for seconds. What was that? Are they any pictures of tripletts in the sky of a Shuttle + space station + cargo ship? During this observations I allready wonderd why the sky in the area just below the arc of the spacecrafts was slightly green, but very faint, like some cloud, and there was still some light in the West, where the sun did set. After the passes I stayed a bit longer and it was worth it. The lights devoloped to a beatiful Corona Australis, my first polar Lights ever. I can confirm there was a geomagnetic storm, and what a beatiful one. Nearly all the time from then I saw vertical stripes or faint red bars, coming from about 50 deg alt down to 10 deg leading to the green/red lights that reached down to about 3 degrees above the southern horizon. Later on it changed form often and started to dance sometimes. And a long time there was these nice green semi-arc, certainly around the magnetic South Pole. I watched that for about 90 minutes, because I went home after the second pass for last night of the STS/ISS pair. The Asto/Cosmonauts up there must have had a nice view on the lights from above. Not to forget to mention one of the most beatiful meteors for me at 19:57:37 in the South, coming straight down from 50 deg to 15 deg in about 4 seconds with a 15 deg or so long tail that changed colour serveral times with green, red, yellow, orange. It was going very nice to the Corona Australis and vanished just above it. Maybe the diffrent colors where caused/influenced by the corona Australis? Thank you to the man from Canberra/Australia too, that I met on the beach road, who is in the Australian Astronomical Society. During whatching the lights we talked and he said he doesn’t like satellites that much, because they sometimes screw up the astronomical pictures. All times are local NZST (UTC+12). Alexander ____________________________________________________________________ Alexander Marschand www.geocities.com/alexoidm Dunedin, New Zealand 45.8670S 170.5000E 20m NZST (UTC+12:00) _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Tue Mar 20 2001 - 14:34:57 PST