Sunday 21 January 2007

Its flaring time again...! (updated)

Drifting fields of clouds made observing a gamble this evening. In between the cloud fields however, it was marvellously clear again.

I had the fortune to observe and photograph another very nice flare of Lacrosse 4 (00-047A, #26473), again just before eclipse entry. It briefly flared to mag. 0 at 19:29:41 +/- 2s UTC, near the Andromeda-Pegasus border. The decline in brightness after the flare was very rapid, unlike the rise to it, perhaps due to the eclipse entry (predicted for 19:29:53 UTC).

(click image to enlarge)


I lost the first pass of Lacrosse 5 (05-016A, #28646) at 17:35 UTC to an untimely pass of a field of clouds (3 minutes after the pass, it was completely clear again...). The same almost happened to the second pass at 19:19 UTC. I did capture it on one image through a hole in the cloud cover though (see below). In fact the second image shows it too, through the cloud cover...but is useless of course for position determinations.

(click image to enlarge)
note: times should read 19:18:36.1 -19:18:46.8 UTC


Update: Like yesterday, 00-047A was 0.8s late, 0.05 degree off-track.
05-016A was exactly on-time and on-track: it doesn't happen every day that you get such results:

STAT__YYday HH:MM:SS.sss___XTRK____deltaT___Perr
4353__07 21 19:18:36.100___0.00____0.00_____0.003
4353__07 21 19:18:46.800__-0.00____0.00_____0.005

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