In spite of a lot of clouds around and it being only 15 degrees above the horizon, and based on some months or longer ago Mike suggesting that it always flashes around 3:00 UTC when it's low in the east, I easily saw good old Superbird A (89-041A, 20040) with my 8x42 from about 2:51:23 to 2:54:11 May 26 UTC. PPAS: 89- 41 A 04-05-26 02:54:11 EC 145.7 0.2 13 11.21 +4.0->inv If you've never seen a flashing geosynch, this is your chance. It's bright enough to be easy with 7x binoculars, flashes every 11.2 seconds for about three or four minutes (and every 22.4 for a minute or two before and after that), and is easy to locate among the stars, especially with the good-sized FOV of binoculars. It also happens that its flash episode doesn't move much relative to the stars from night to night, so once you've found it, you know when and where to look for it the next night. It will take a few weeks to move from low in the east from here to low in the west, and it flashes 60 to 80 seconds later each night depending on your location. What I can't remember at the moment is the difference in time of its flashes in different locations, but I think it's not a lot, especially within a given time zone. I'm not sure if it will be visible in the Pacific time zone this time since it's flashing pretty early in the evening here. Here's Iridium 914's (97-030A, 24836) flash sequence from its pass some hours ago, all very easy to see without binoculars: Begin 2004-05-26 02:18:24.37 11.54 13.15 3.18 8.36 3.18 11.56 13.33 02:19:28.67 End Ney Museum site: 30.307N, 97.727W, 150m. I've been trying to time Dodecapole 2 (65-065C, 01510), and when I add up the primary, secondary, and tertiary flashes, it seems like its flash period is around ten seconds. I can't find a good image of it now, but it's also called "Porcupine". I looked at the zenith to see a low pass of COMETS (98-011A, 25175), and there was another object beside it, also going west to east. It seems to have been 65-082AF (01668), which the SSR calls "Titan 3C Transtage Debris" [AF]. It was about +5.0 magnitude up there at the zenith. FWIW, I just stumbled across the "US Space Objects Registry", a web site of the US Department of State: http://www.usspaceobjectsregistry.state.gov/ No response from OIG at the moment (7:30-35 UTC). 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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