Thanks for the information. The satellites all seem to show an equal appearance under comparing conditions; the round shape mostly when it passes not overhead but is seen under a larger angle. This drawing of a Lacrosse shows clearly a big dish antenenna: http://spacefacts.de/graph/drawing/drawings2/sts-27_lacrosse.jpg Solar panels of a satellite are in much cases not well visible. For example: I captured many passes of the Progress M-04M last june and just on a few occasions, the viewing angle enabled to see the solar panels. Ralf ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Molczan" <ssl3molcz@rogers.com> To: <SeeSat-L@satobs.org> Sent: Monday, August 02, 2010 9:04 PM Subject: {Spam?} RE: {Spam?} Lacrosse 4 _USA-152) (26473 2000-047-A) telescopic OBS Ralf Vandebergh wrote: > Here are some observations of Lacrosse 4 spacecraft from last evening > during a 74° culm NW pass: > > http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/1997/lacrosse410010823342931.jpg > > The drop-shape is a typical behave of a Lacrosse satellite seen from > a certain angle. Here is an older image from a professional telescope > of the Lacrosse 1: > > http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/track/lacr1_2.jpg Three years ago, Allen Thomson alerted the list to more recent professional imagery, by Russia's Altay Optical-Laser Center: http://satobs.org/seesat/Jun-2007/0275.html Images of Lacrosse 2 and other satellites are on slide 14 of the following presentation at the site in Allen's post: http://www.niipp-moskva.ru/ppt/booklet_IPIE_int.ppt Allen's translation revealed that the scale is the short white bar within the caption on the left edge of the image on slide 14; the length of that bar is 1 arc sec. I will take a stab at calculating the size of what appears to be the satellite's dominant feature: a dish antenna (corrections/improvements welcome!): The scale bar appears to be about 22 pixels long, and the dish of the middle Lacrosse image is about 34 pixels wide; therefore, 1*34/22 = 1.5 arc sec for the dish. On the pass on which that image was taken, Lacrosse's closest range was 816 km, which would result in ~4 m per arc sec, which makes the dish at least 1.5 x 4 m = 6 m wide. Of course, the image range could have been somewhat further, up to perhaps 1000 km, in which case, 1 arc sec = 4.9 m, which would make the dish about 7.4 m. The plane of the dish appears not to be perpendicular to the observer, so perhaps its real diameter is somewhat greater, but not by much (I guess). Further reading: Allen's source book on the Altay Optical-Laser Center http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/track/altay.pdf Ted Molczan _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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