Probably mostly due to the full Moon I only saw eight flaring geosats last night. One of the ones in the 21:00 RA area got up to at least +5 for just two or three minutes or so, while two in the 00:00 RA area got that bright also but stayed bright for several minutes. I wonder if a different type of solar panel might explain the ones flaring three hours before shadow entry. Here's an illustration of one of the XM Radio satellites that shows the three-sided shape (three sides of a trapezoid) of the panels: http://www.hsc.com/hsc_pressreleases/photogallery/xm1/xm1c.html I don't have any idea which other ones might have that type of panels. My consolation for so few geosats was finding Gorizont 14 (17969) and then an unexpected one near it: 87- 40 A 01-10-03 04:43:30 EC 2715.1 0.4 31 87.58 +6->inv While I was watching it, another one flashed about three degrees to the east of it in my FOV. As they were both around -17 declination, my best guess at the moment is that the UNID was probably GSTAR 3 (19483, 88-081A). I saw only three or four flashes of this one; two were separated by about 3:32, and another "split" was about 7:05 (caught while I continued to time Gorizont 14). The ISS pass last night was really pretty! Observing site was 30.315N, 97.866W, 280m. 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://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 03 2001 - 05:27:00 EDT