Last night I found a "flaring geosat" with my handheld 10x50 binoculars, and Mike McCants confirmed it with his telescope and found a fainter one just .25 degrees to the west of it. I haven't had time yet (so much e-mail!) to ID them, but I think that it's very likely that the bright one was Galaxy 11 (or "XI", 99-071A, 26038). It was at the correct altitude and azimuth. I first noticed it when it was at about RA 21:19:30, Dec -5.0 (2000). I found it when I was just "practicing" looking at some known asterisms at the correct declination and noticed that there appeared to be an extra star (about +6 maybe) that soon proved not to be fixed with the other stars. So, I can definitely recommend this method -- get familiar with two or three asterisms along the correct declination for your latitude, and look at them every few minutes to see if you see an extra "star". If you do, give it a minute to see if its position changes relative to the asterism. We don't understand why they should be starting to flare at this latitude this far ahead of the equinox, and also why they can flare at such a long distance from the Earth's shadow, but it seems that at least some of them do. I saw three or four one-power flashes last night from Orion 3 (99-024A, 25727), when it was quite far to the west of its culmination. Last night's 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 : Thu Sep 20 2001 - 17:55:53 EDT