Patty Winter wrote:

In article ,

flyguy wrote:

You didn't give the date of your sitings.


Yes, s/he did. The posting was made the afternoon of Saturday,
March 28th, and referred to "last night." So the sightings were
on Friday, March 27.

If it was on the evening of
Friday March-27, one of the other objects could have been the ISS tool
bag which was accidentally lost by an astronaut doing an EVA on a
previous Shuttle mission last fall. This 'satellite' is currently
trailing the ISS by about 5-minutes. It's brightness is close to the
limit of vision with the unaided eye (no binoculars) but you could have
seen it if the sky was very clear and dark.


I wondered about that, too, but figured it was too faint to be seen
anywhere near a city. Of course, one doesn't have to go far from Ottawa
to be in the country, so "mywoodroffe" could have quite dark skies.
(BTW, I had a great time in Ottawa and visiting the Diefenbunker last
summer. The latter is only about half an hour from Parliament Hill
but is in a very rural area.)

BTW, There actually wasn't any pass of the ISS *directly* over Ottawa
last week. The highest one was on Friday evening March-27, which reached
a maximum altitude of 69-deg above the North-Northeast horizon at
9:05pm-EDT.


Yeah, 69 deg. could easily look "overhead" to someone not experienced
with gauging the elevations of astronomical objects.


Patty

I figured March-27 was the most likely date of the sitings but I don't
have much confidence in Usenet posting dates, so I just wanted to be
sure I wasn't wasting my time searching the wrong date.

I too have very dark skies within a half hours drive from home so I
should make an effort to see the tool bag. It should be fairly easy to
locate with the ISS ahead of it by a few minutes. I tried to see
'Suitsat' with no success. That's got to be the weirdest 'satellite' in
the history of man made earth orbiting objects. What was the first
identifiable satellite you ever saw? For me it was Echo-1A in the autumn
of 1960. I was about 9-years old so that event started my life long
interest in observing satellites.

BTW, Have you seen Hubble? I'm pretty sure I've seen it at least once.
It would be pretty low on the southern horizon for an observer in
southern Quebec or Ontario. It never gets higher than about 12-deg for
me. Hopefully it will be easier to observe when the Shuttle goes to it
this year.