No wonder Mike and I failed to see Raduga 33! We looked too late. Robert Fenske wrote: >Just had a SW-->NE 89deg pass of Raduga 33 in deep twilight. >Was about 45 sec early relative to this elset taken from >Alan Pickup's decay watch page: > >Raduga 33 6.0 2.0 0.0 5.5 d 17 4399 x 100 km >1 23794U 96010A 04125.07459477 .61106009 65346-1 25830-2 0 94998 >2 23794 47.7759 123.0736 2491047 95.1002 293.5095 10.83404382 72074 The Austin culmination of that much better elset was 2:00:27. I had it at 2:02:22, with one-minute uncertainty, using this elset: Raduga 33 1 23794U 96010A 04124.79412371 .50827871 14928-4 27717-2 0 5006 2 23794 47.7501 123.8195 2645285 94.3990 296.0746 10.49105695 72043 Later Mike began searching for 97-68B (25035). It turned up in his field of view after about 45 minutes. This was very good luck! In spite of it being within 30 degrees and less of the Moon, from at least 3:00-3:07, south of Arcturus, it was not hard to see in my 8x42, and it did some significantly brighter flashes than its usual maxima. Without binoculars Gravity Probe B was visible for a long time and then did one fairly bright flash in the NW. Without binoculars I watched Fleetsatcom 4 Centaur Rk (12069) for four minutes -- a very nice pass. I watched four final flashes with magnification. PPAS: 80- 87 B 04-05-04 02:40:26 EC 323.5 0.5 23 14.07 +1.5->inv Shi Jian 4 Rk (94-010C, 22997), a Long March, was very bright. It was easy to see without binoculars even fairly near the Moon, and its range over there was 1500-1600 km. It seems its Quicksat intrinsic magnitude may be +1.0 rather than the +1.5 that I've had for it. BCRC: 30.315N, 97.866W, 280m. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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