Hi Tom and List, > I was watching a Leonid meteor flash by in a movie available at the URL > below when I noticed what appears to be a satellite slowing moving along > in the middle portion of the picture. The meteor slashes right across > the satellite. Neat! > See: > http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/IMAGES/leonid-satellite.mov I thought this would be a fun exercise to determine the satellite in this movie. Alas, I remain stumped due to a lack of information. They don't indicate the field of view or sensitivity of the camera, so matching up the starfield is next to impossible. They don't indicate the time standard, but I've determined that it was probably UTC+9 hours (Okinawa local time). The platform location is not specifically given, but the FISTA aircraft was supposedly in the vicinity of Okinawa, so I've used those coordinates with a 30,000' altitude. The three most useful bits of information are the date and time-tag in the image, the direction of the Leonid and the direction and speed of the satellite. The satellite is moving almost, but not quite toward the radiant. If you assume the satellite is in a polar orbit (playing the odds), then it is either moving south toward Leo, or north toward Leo. From this, you can at least begin to constrain the starfield search. Using SkyMap with an old Allan Thompson archive elset from 11/18/1998, I searched for all satellites heading approximately toward the Leonid radiant at 4:43:35 (UTC+9). These are the only candidates brighter than magnitude 6.5: southbound: Iridium 83 (m5.8) northbound: Cosmos 203 R/B (m6.0) eastbound: DFS 3 R/B (m6.0) Unfortunately, I can't get the starfields to match up with the video for any of these satellites. Best, Rob ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Dec 31 2001 - 15:18:49 EST