This very large (think tennis court), reflective satellite has been around for awhile now, but was an early morning object.  However recently it has also become an evening object -- and these things just seem much more accessible when they don't involve alarm clocks!  I've been watching the ISS, HST, Iridium flares, etc. for a long time so i thought I'd take a look at the latest one.

The Heavens Above website shows times and directions, but so far brightness listings are all question marks.  However, there is this paper estimating the visual brightness:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09811

The pass that I saw this evening (Monday 11/21/2022) started at 7:01:25 PM in the WSW.  I found it naked eye but observed partly with 7X30 stabilized binoculars.  It appeared as very nearly a point source of moving white light, increasing brightness and arcing through the western sky to the WNW.  At 7:04:29 PM and about 41 degrees up near the star Vega, it went into darkness of earth's shadow.  It did not appear to be tumbling or blinking.  Maximum brightness was dimmer than Vega (which is about mag 0.2), and certainly dimmer than the ISS at equal altitude (perhaps mag  -3).  My rough estimate would be BlueWalker 3 was about mag 2.

This is supposedly the prototype of this type of satellite, so we can look forward to (or dread) the appearance of many more of these things, probably to the point that they will be routine and not worthy of comment.

Roy