[Chaos-l] [Medoc-mountain-men] last night

[Alexey Toptygin]

On Sat, 22 Sep 2012, Alexey Toptygin wrote:

> On Sat, 22 Sep 2012, Robert Nielsen wrote:
>
>> Allen,
>> 
>> I can definitely back you up on the central star in the Ring Nebula last 
>> night.  It is the first time I have ever seen it ... in my life. Thanks for 
>> giving me the opportunity with that nice new mirror you have. I think it 
>> was a combination of that and the better-than-the-CSC-predicted seeing last 
>> night that made it possible. I was continually using my 13mm eyepiece in my 
>> scope, which is more magnification than I usually use at Medoc.
>
> I saw it too, but only for about a second at a time. The image seemed to 
> clarify and the star was there, then it would be gone again.
>
>> Like the "special" object Alexey and Michael found ... I'll let them 
>> explain ...
>
> Around midnight, Michael was helping me out by looking for M73 in his (much 
> larger) scope, since I wasn't able to find it in mine. He said he saw 
> something flash; I'd been looking through his telrad at the same time and I 
> hadn't seen anything. He saw it again a few more times and then let me take a 
> look: it was flashing about every 10 seconds and moving very slowly. When we 
> first saw it it was between Albali and nu-Aquariae (near the Saturn nebula) 
> and over the next 45 minutes or so it moved past nu towards Deneb Algedi at 
> roughly 3-4 degrees per hour. I watched it in my binoculars until I left 
> around 12:50.
>
> I think it was Robert that pointed out that it was most likely space debris 
> rotating once per 10 seconds. Considering how slowly it was moving, it must 
> be in a very high orbit, or at least near the apogee of a higly elliptical 
> one.

My completely unverified back-of-the-envelope calculations tell me that if 
I severely underestimated the rate of movement relative to background 
stars and it was more like 7.75 degrees per hour, then the object we saw 
could be on a geosynchronous transfer orbit (but why would you leave 
anyting in a GTO?). If the rate of motion is less than that (and more 
consistent with what I remember), then regardless of the eccentricity the 
apogee has to be higher than geosynchronous orbit, which would be even 
more unusual, IIUC. Either way we saw one weird sattellite.

 			Alexey