The bright moon certainly caused problems last night , but camera obs over a period of three hours ( 1930 gmt - 2330 gmt) produced about 300 useable frames from the 19 east Astra group (Seven spacecraft) The results can be seen here ( selected 11 second frames) : http://mysite.freeserve.com/satcom_transits/astrashadowa.gif ( 5mb) or in greatly reduced size here http://mysite.freeserve.com/satcom_transits/astrashadowb.gif (2mb) Shadow entry occured at 08/03/2004 22:24:58; 12.48s according to the camera log and the washout due to increasing lunar glare is plain to see. In the final frame , captured around 2325 the seven birds can just be seen after emerging from eclipse . A certain amount of contrast adjustment had to be made to this frame to bring out the very faint detail. Interestingly the "rotation " of the middle group of three sats is quite pronounced. FOV 30 arc minutes.....Meade LX90 8 inch , 25 mm eyepiece projection. Regards, John. http://www.satcom.freeserve.co.uk/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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