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

[Robert Nielsen]

And I just looked at my planetarium program (SkySafari) and looked at what was near that point in the sky at that time last Friday night.

The geosynchronous orbit for satellites isn't very far from there, just a little higher in the sky (between Albali and Sadalsuud or Beta Aquarii).   So if one had malfunctioned and moved slightly, it could have appeared in that area.   But there were also some satellites that were supposed to be in that area itself (MSAT M1 and LES 9 or perhaps INMARSAT 4-F3 or ICO G1). Given your description, it was moving the right way, from Albali towards Deneb Algedi.   So I'm pretty sure it was either a functioning satellite, or a piece of one.

In fact, if I had to pick a particular satellite that matches your description, I would pick AMC-14.  But there are lots of them in the general area.

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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