Last night was even better than Wednesday night! I was able to find 90007/00-653A and observe three flash cycles between 1:20:12 and 1:22:54. I'm not sure if I just lost it after that or if it faded out. Anyway, if I saw the peak flashes, that's about 128 minutes earlier than the peak time on October 4 and works out to about 5.5 or 5.6 minutes earlier per night. The brightest flashes were at least +4.5. 05 0 1:20:12.16 06 27.73 1:20:39.89 07 26.05 1:21:05.94 08 27.83 1:21:33.77 09 26.11 1:21:59.88 10 27.91 1:22:27.79 11 26.00 1:22:53.79 Cosmos 2344 (24827, 97-28A) flared to a solid -2 for three or four seconds after being visible at one-power, about +3, for a couple of minutes. Its range was more than 3,200 km and increasing during the pass. Its RCS is large. When I saw it flare before (a year or more ago?), it was a similar northbound evening pass west of the meridian. FleetSatCom 4 Rk (12069, 80-087B) did a very nice one-power pass (+2.5 maxima), at a range of at least 1,400 km. Its flash period is now about 10.5 seconds. It remained clear late enough to see Superbird A! I timed flashes from 3:34:03 until 3:40:20 and saw three one-power flashes at about 3:37, the brightest possibly about +3. 00-653 A 00-10-27 01:22:54 EC 161.6 0.3 3 53.9 mag +4.5->inv 80- 87 B 00-10-27 01:49:16 EC 116.5 0.3 11 10.59 mag +2.5->inv 89- 41 A 00-10-27 03:40:20 EC 343.1 0.3 15 22.88 mag +3.0->inv Asiasat 1 Rk (20559, 90-030B) made a one-power pass, about +3, at a range of about 1,900 km. Seemed pretty steady. I saw three one-power Raduga 33 (23794, 96-010A) flashes, the first two being the brightest, maybe +1, the third about +3: 01 0 1:09:18.60 02 17.78 1:09:36.38 03 17.96 1:09:54.34 Obs. location: E. Ney Museum grounds, 30.307N, 97.727W, 150m. Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Fri Oct 27 2000 - 01:52:26 PDT