Hi all, At the end of another fine pre-dawn session I was waiting for a pass of the ISS. While preparing the camera I realised I had used elements from before last nights orbit boost for ISS, so I reckoned it might perhaps appear somewhat off-time. At 5:42 UTC, 1 minute early, I saw a bright object appear in Gemini close to but slightly south of the point where ISS should emerge from earth shadow. It initially was about mag. +0.5 in brightness. "Ah, there it is!" I thought and triggered the camera... image here: http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b176/marcoaliaslama/satellites/UARS2911.jpg As the camera ended its exposure, I realized something was wrong. My brain registered disappointment about the brightness of this "ISS", wondered about a 1 minute early appearance (a bit too much??), and as I watched the object I realized its course was bringing it much too much north to be ISS...so, this was an imposter! So I quickly swapped back the camera. And yes, there it appeared,low west, almost at te moment I turned my sight to it: the *real* ISS, close to Castor and Pollux, at a splendid bright mag. -3...! Image here: http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b176/marcoaliaslama/satellites/1ISS2911.jpg The "imposter" was later identified as te Upper atmospheric research satellite UARS (91-063B, #21701). The darn thing almost fooled me...! :-p Like from my images of last Friday, I constructed a mozaik of two ISS trail images from this morning again: http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b176/marcoaliaslama/satellites/ISScomp5.jpg Apart from ISS and UARS, I also imaged Lacrosses 2 & 3 this morning, and a second stray (on one of the Lacrosse 2 images) which turned out to be 70-037B (#04394), a Russian rocket stage from the Meteor 1-4 lauch. Positions will follow later, I still have to measure most images. - Marco :-) ----- Dr Marco Langbroek - SatTrackCam Leiden, Cospar 4353 Leiden, the Netherlands. 52.15412 N, 4.49081 E (WGS84), +0 m ASL SatTrackCam: http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek/satcam.html Station (b)log: http://sattrackcam.blogspot.com Atom RSS: http://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/atom.xml e-mail: sattrackcam@wanadoo.nl ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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