Hey All,
Saw a very interesting object last night at
-2:01:15 UT moving parallel to the outer two "handle"
stars of the Teapot (Sigma and Tau Sagittarius), about
3 degrees away, towards my SSE horizon. It was moving
at what looked to be twice as fast as a satellite, but
it did not have any appearance of a slow moving
meteor. It moved fast with steady magnitude of ~3.5
and then disappeared (eclipsed?) just as it got beyond
Tau Sagittarius. My location information is below. If
this thing was a satellite, it must be ready to
re-enter soon based on the fact that is was moving so
fast and eclipsed *before* nautical twilight my time.
Can anyone tell me what this was?
Also, I have spent this northern summer trying to
catch ever single NOSS 2-* triplet pass there is for
me above 40 degrees culmination. These have all
occurred late at night. There is definitely a pattern
to how bright these sets of 3 objects get depending on
their direction across the sky and where the sun is
below the horizon. I've determined that if they fly
out on a line that would eventually intersect the sun
below the night horizon (think of this as a ray
sunlight after sunset) then they are bright naked eye
objects that match the brightness of most
constellations in the nothern hemisphere. If, however,
they *cross* a line coming from the sun then they are
nearly invisible to the naked eye. From this
observation, I have guessed them to be cylindrical
objects with maybe a booster in the aft and an
omni-directional antenna in the front. They are
probably facet around their cylindrical bodies which
might explain their varying brightness w.r.t. each
other. Any thoughts? I highly encourage others to look
ahead to nighttime passes that intersect the sun - you
won't be disappointed! (The three USSATCOM numbers I
have set up H-A Pass reports on are: 20691, 21799, and
23908 - all of the "C" objects).
Regards,
Jeff Umbarger
Plano, TX USA
Lat: +33.06946 (N)
Lon: -96.76807 (W)
GMT-6 (CST)
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