Hi All After obtaining my third visual obs of FIA Radar 2, 2012-014A, 38109 last night, I was struck by the dramatic change in optical appearance of the s/c from my obs of it during the 4th orbit on April 4th. Particularly after looking at the video footage of the two passes side by side... I choose last night's pass so that it would coincide with almost the same geometry as the pass I observed during its 4th orbit. What struck me was that on the 4th orbit the s/c was rather dim and last evening rather bright and not as affected by phase angle as earlier. See for yourself in this video (43MB): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15916951/SATOBS/FIA2_Comparison.mpg Please note that the polar mount I use was inverted during the second obs session relative to the first obs session. To help you understand the mount geometry and how similar the passes where, here are two Heavensat screen grabs showing the relative geometry of the beginning of each video segment. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15916951/SATOBS/FIA2_Orbit4.JPG http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15916951/SATOBS/FIA2_Apr6.JPG Here's what the mount/lens and camera looks like in daylight: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15916951/SATOBS/Polar_mount.JPG I propose that this shows that the radar antenna was deployed sometime between these two observations. It will be interesting to conduct a review of other observations during this period to perhaps nail down when they actually deployed the antenna array and how much this affected the s/c's brightness and other optical characteristics... Looking forward to other ideas... Regards, Scott Tilley ROBERTS CREEK 1: 8049 ST 49.4348 -123.6685 40. Scott Tilley ROBERTS CREEK 2: 8048 ST 49.4175 -123.6420 1. Scott Tilley _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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