Hi Ed, The closest match I was able to find was a piece of debris, 63014DK, within a half degree of the star at about 4:45:10 UT. Without knowing the field of view and orientation of the image (and whether it is mirror-image reversed) it is difficult to say whether this is a possible match or not. There are several odd things about this track. The first is the short trail length -- as if it started and ended within the field of view of the camera during the 15-minute exposure. This suggests a VERY distant object -- much higher apogee than the vast majority of the objects in Mike's alldat.tle (and perhaps higher than ANY of them). Either that, or there was a brief solar glint off the object. I don't like the latter explanation as much since the track stays fairly uniformly bright rather than gradually cutting on and off (i.e. where's the cosine dependence?). The other oddity is that the track seems to have bright "stars" exactly at its beginning and end, which seems rather improbable. And even more suspicious is that the object just happens to be near the brightest star in the image. All of these things lead me to believe that the streak is an artifact, and not an image of a real object. Cheers, 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
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