subject: Progress M-06M & Rocket, few hours after launch ________________________________________________________ As weather continues to be good here, a very rare occasion, I succeeded to capture the just launched Progress M-06M while it passed 66° N, flying W-E. Apparent speed is much higher short after launch, and getting good images is no easy job, as generally never is, with these small spacecraft. Observing/lighting angle is not as nice as with the recent M-04M image, but I'm quite satisfied, expecially as I never caught a Progress so short after launch; http://tinyurl.com/3y762wp The rocket passes about 1.5 minutes at 62°N before the Progress and a nice regular flashing pattern was visible. Capturing the rocket was a difficult job, due to the dim moments, were I lost the rocket out of view, while the flashes were too short to get it well centered back. This is a general problem with flashing satellites with very dim moments. The Soyuz TMA-19 rocket which I captured earlier, was much more steady in brightness, but showed still flashes (thanks to observations of visual satellite observer Wim Holwerda). It became never dim, so I got the rocket much better centered and captured more frames. The few frames I captured of the Progress M-06M rocket are quite interesting and I made an animation of it. You see only a part of one tumbling/rotation, and is captured within one second. Note the already visible tumbling effect and difference in brightness: http://tinyurl.com/2w4vnyf Ralf Vandebergh -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/private/seesat-l/attachments/20100701/e6331f12/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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