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

[Robert Nielsen]

Alexey,

Well, I don't think anyone *left* the object in the orbit where we saw it Friday night.  As I said, I think it is space junk, tumbling out of control and possibly losing altitude and eventually burning up in the atmosphere.  I could have just been a single solar panel off a bigger satellite.  I could be the booster section of a rocket that didn't make it into orbit.   It wasn't a normal, functioning satellite (which normally maintain their position and orientation).

I think there are websites that can help determine which satellite it was (or was part of).    And I'm sure NORAD would know ...

Robert



On Sep 23, 2012, at 4:29 AM, Alexey Toptygin <alexeyt at freeshell.org> wrote:

> 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
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