this morning, 2004/08/26 at about 05:45 EDT (US East Coast) i was out looking to see if i would be able to see some satellites that Orbitron predicted i should be able to see. Lacrosse 2 was the one i was looking for and missed...<br /><br />but i did see something else that i've not been able to locate at all in any of the TLEs from mike mccants' or ts kelso's stuff... what i did after i saw this object, was to go to orbitron and load every TLE file i have... they are all updated every night from the original sources. then i went to the prediction setup and entered a short time span to search... no more than 5 minutes either side of 05:45 EST but it had only been a few minutes since the object had passed before i was inside hunting it down...<br /><br />Grid: FM05hl<br />Lon: 79.3750 W<br />Lat: 35.4792 N<br />Alt: 78.0 meters<br />Prediction Setup: Manual<br />Start: 2004-08-26 05:40:00 (local time, EDT)<br />Stop: 2004-08-26 05:50:00 (local time, EDT)<br /><br />the system searched 2000(+?) TLEs and was only able to find the two that were already predicted to pass. this object did not fit either of those predictions.<br /><br />initial sighting of the object was at about Az: 340 El: 30 Mag: 3.5-4.0 or so... on exit, the object was at about Az: 230 El: 15 Mag: 3.0 or so... during the transit, the mag reached an estimated 1.5 or thereabouts...<br /><br />i don't have much in the way of determining these with more accuracy... i can only try to recreate and take measurements...<br /><br />these measurements seem to match with "Aura Del2 r", NORAD: 28377, COSPAR: 2004-026-B... but the elevation is not right... orbitron says that at Az: 337, 28377 is at El: 59.6 but that's much too high for this sighting... additionally for the rest of the transit... tracking this in STSPlus gives pretty much the same results...<br /><br />the MAIN thing that i know is that i didn't look any higher than about 30 degrees (if even that) for this entire transit... also the transit was very fast... as fast or faster than ISS with the shuttle chasing it <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="images/icons/default/wink.gif" /> <br /><br />what am i missing? is this bird really the one that i saw?

forgot to put in the TLE used for NORAD 28377 in case they are of any assistance...<br /><br /></font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Aura Del2 r 7.0 2.0 0.0 5.0 d 10<br />1 28377U 04026B 04237.97707533 +.00484481 +54267-5 +62689-3 0 00719<br />2 28377 103.0293 208.8292 0253806 172.7564 187.7453 15.67516319006290[/code]</blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">

There are a lot of debris up there that are not included on any of the TLE's that are provided. It could have been almost any of these, or even one of the classified sats.<br /><br />There are hundreds of shrouds and covers that are in low orbit that travel quite fast and reflect a lot of light. The russian sats are well known for a lot of debris.

I agree with David in that there are a lot of debris up there that can easily confuse us.<br /><br />My location is as follows... <br />Grid: QG62mt<br />Lat: 27.1158 S<br />Lon: 153.0147 E<br /><br />Best regards,<br /><br />Kazza Mac