Unidentified flaring satellite

From: Ricardo J. Tohmé via Seesat-l <seesat-l_at_satobs.org>
Date: Wed, 6 May 2015 01:11:51 -0300
I'm sorry about asking this since I'm quite a newbie when it comes to
identifying unknown satellites, but sadly, the following video is being
touted by the local media as an UFO seen from my city, Bahía Blanca
(latitude 38º 44' 06" S, longitude 62º 14' 02" W) on the evening of Monday,
April 4th, 2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPikxwZgmjQ

Since it seemed to me this was nothing but some satellite flare, I decided
to look into the issue and try to identify it. I grabbed a screenshot from
the 2m8s mark on the video, deleted the satellite using Photoshop, and
Astrometry.net promptly identified the sky area as part of the
constellation Columba:

http://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/663199#annotated

So basically, this would put the unidentified satellite almost "touching"
the star Xi Columbae (HIP 28010) at 07:20:53pm, and the star Gamma Columbae
(HIP 28199) at 07:20:57pm, assuming the video timestamp is accurate (which
the observer that videotaped this claims to be).

Taking this into account, I've done searches for known satellites using
Stellarium and Heavens-Above.com and have come empty-handed in both cases.
I have no doubt someone on this list will be able to easily check this, or
at least provide some advice on how to deepen the search.

Thanks in advance,

Ricardo J. Tohmé
rtohme_at_gmail.com
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Received on Tue May 05 2015 - 23:13:12 UTC

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