hello, Thursday evening I tried 3 geostationary flashers and all of them were easily found and flashing bright enough to be visible with binoculars, magnitude +7 or brighter at max. Raduga 27 = 91- 14 A = 21132 period is still going down nicely, easy with binoculars : 03-01-04 21:14 KJ 69.33 03-01-04 21:23 LB 69.34 03-01-08 19;24 KJ 68.91 03-01-08 20:10 KJ 68.91 03-01-08 20:36 LB 68.91 03-01-10 20:18 LB 68.67 03-01-30 22:35 KJ 65.87 (obs of Leo and I) Gorizont 14 = 87- 40 A = 17969 Period was 87.105s on Dec 26, 2002. Now it is 86.79s, so going down during the winter as expected (see http://users.skynet.be/satimage/bwgs/kj/gorizont.htm) From now onwards it is also visible from the East coast of America and will become visible from e.g. Texas beginning of next week. So again we can try to make simultanous obs of this one. While observing the sharp maxima of around +5 with my 8 inch Dibsonian, I noticed that around 10 seconds before the real maxima it become visible at around mag +13, slowly brightning till around +11, then giving the flash of +5 and again slowly fading over about 10 seconds to become invisible again. I had never noticed this before, probably I had a favourable orientation so see also diffuse flashes ? Also at other times during the long period it became brighter than +13. A secundary halfway maximum of mag +11 was also seen. So some surface is giving round long diffuse maxima every half period and a sharp flash is seen every full period. Gorizont 16 = 88- 71 A = 19397 Patrick Wils, Belgium sent me an obs of this one two weeks ago, so I checked the PPAS(see below) and found only a limited number of obs showing an slowly increasing period, but till now it was never observed during winter when other Gorizonts are usually accelerating. Now comparing my period of 98.36 seconds with Patricks obs of 98.53 shows again that Gorizont 16 might obey the seasonal variations... To be checked !! This one is drifting westwards by one degree a day, and is also becoming visible from US in the next weeks. As the drift is pretty slow we have more time to try simultanous obs of this one. Currently around 22h also an easy binoculars object from here. I could again see a diffuse max and secundary max of around +11.5. 88- 71 A 00-07-22 MM 93.5 sm 88- 71 A 00-07-30 SDL 93.58 dT=2433.1 88- 71 A 00-07-31 SDL 93.59 dT=2556.6 88- 71 A 00-08-02 SDL 93.62 dT=2995.8 88- 71 A 00-08-03 EC 93 6->inv 88- 71 A 00-08-04 SDL 93.66 dT=2716.3 88- 71 A 00-08-06 SDL 93.67 dT=3372.2 mag 5->inv. 88- 71 A 00-08-07 SDL 93.69 dT=2717.1 mag 5->inv. 88- 71 A 01-05-23 MM 94.35 88- 71 A 02-04-01 EC 95.77 +7->inv 88- 71 A 03-01-11 PW 98.53 +6->inv 88- 71 A 03-01-30 KJ 98.36 Observations of Mike McCants, Ed Cannon, Stephen Delalumondiere, Patrick Wils, Kurt Jonckheere. in PPAS : 87- 40 A 03-01-30 21:47:28.5 KJ 1215.0 .15 14 86.79 mag +4 ->inv 91- 14 A 03-01-30 22:35:15.9 KJ 1317.5 0.1 20 65.874 mag +7 ->inv 88- 71 A 03-01-30 22:28:24.7 KJ 1573.8 0.4 16 98.36 mag +7->inv Regards, Kurt ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 : Sat Feb 01 2003 - 09:28:05 EST