This experiment may get me in over my head, but anyway ... because it's fun to see and I want to encourage/help others to see it, I've put online Highfly predictions for Superbird A for the next two weeks for Austin and San Antonio, Texas. They are at 4-minute (one-degree) steps for the hour or so, in universal time, around the current flash event. As I mentioned previously, I can't provide the exact time for the bright flash event, but it's currently roughly five minutes around 3:30-40 UTC, plus or minus several minutes depending on your location -- and 60 to 90 seconds later from night to night. The event goes kind of like this -- a few flashes, getting brighter, every 22.6 seconds; appearance of a second flash at 11.3 seconds; both flashes, possibly brighter than +3, every 11.3 seconds for two or three minutes; first flash growing fainter and disappearing; last two or three flashes separated by 22.6 seconds until you can't see it. Again with a few tips: 1. Use a low-power, wide-angle instrument, e.g., 7x35 or 7x50 or 10x50 binoculars. (If the instrument is mounted, it will be less tiring.) 2. Select a recognizable, findable asterism very near the position of Superbird A at the estimated flashing event time, as a place to watch for the flashes to appear. 3. Look for 25 to 30 seconds out of every minute until you see a flash -- then pay closer attention! If the first one you see is faint, they should get brighter -- unless you started looking several minutes too late. 4. If you use a telescope, you have to be sure that it is pointed at exactly the right place at the right time. 5. One-power/naked-eye observing -- the flashes are bright but are so fast that they can be hard to see if the sky is not pretty dark. 6. If you see something else (not an airplane) flashing in the same field of view -- TELL US! The two prediction files (plain text) are: Austin -- http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~ecannon/sbird-au.txt San Antonio -- http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~ecannon/sbird-sa.txt Highfly is a freeware DOS program by Mike McCants and is available for download on this page: http://users2.ev1.net/~mmccants/programs/index.html Any thoughts from others who've watched it? 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 : Tue Dec 03 2002 - 00:30:49 EST