Flashing high unid

From: Ed Cannon (ecannon@mail.utexas.edu)
Date: Thu May 06 2004 - 05:27:45 EDT

  • Next message: Tony Beresford: "Re: Flashing high unid"

    Congratulations to Ted and Jim P. and whomever else may have 
    seen Raduga 33 glowing and trailing plasma!  Excellent!  The
    rest of us will keep hoping for a similar opportunity!
    
    Flashing unid.  I don't have enough free hard-disk space to
    download and unzip the alldat.tle file.  Using mccants.tle
    and eccen.tle I don't get a good match.  I was trying to see 
    COMETS but saw something else.  It was moving very slowly 
    (maybe .5 degree in a minute, or maybe .25 degree while the 
    stars moved .25 degree to the west?).  It did double-flashes 
    every 2.84 seconds, about +5.5 magnitude.  Unfortunately it 
    disappeared after only a minute or so.  The direction of 
    travel was, I think, about 270 to 290.  The following 
    position is somewhat rough (of course); time is UTC:
    
    2004-05-06 02:11:10 RA 11:03 Dec -13.7 (2000)
    
    I had a very good accidental obs of NOAA 13 (93-050A, 22739),
    for which I had no prediction, while I was looking for a
    couple of flashing geosynchs in the SW.
    
    I had three nearly simultaneous crossers in the 8x42.  I was 
    watching Cosmos 1300 Rk (81-082B, 12786) northbound when a 
    southbound object, Topex (92-052A, 22076) went by, and then
    immediately an eastbound one, 90019, appeared.  This is one
    advantage of an 8-degree FOV.
    
    I was able to see Comet 2001 Q4 (NEAT) from 2:20 to 3:00 UTC,
    a fairly big blob left of Sirius -- not hard using the 8x42.
    
    My site was E. Ney Museum grounds:  30.307N, 97.727W, 150m.
    
    I forgot to mention that Tuesday evening we saw very bright
    flashes from Orion 3 (99-024A, 25727), as bright as -1. 
    PPAS report:
    
    99- 24 A 04-05-05 02:41:04   EC   99.4 0.2   6 16.57  -1>inv asymm
    
    I added "asymmetrical" because of the following timings, 
    which may include a phase shift as well:
    
    16.58, 16.52, 16.57, 16.70, 
    5.35, 11.28, 5.17, 11.45, 5.05,
    16.56, 16.69, 16.51, 16.74
    
    Here's Cosmos 2400 Rk (27870) from earlier this week:
    
    03- 37 C 04-05-03 02:25:30   EC   76.1 0.3  12  6.34  
    
    Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA
    
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