Re: Shuttle water dump
Willie Koorts (wpk@saao.ac.za)
Fri, 11 Dec 1998 22:00:00 +0200 (GMT+0200)
On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Chris Dorreman wrote:
> Wow! Wish I had seen that. What kind of line was this, just a water dump?
> En how long would it have been visible if it didn't disappear in the
> Earth's shadow?
Hi Chris
Yes, I also wished the whole satellite tracking community were here.
The 'line' was about 1/4 degree wide and more or less the same width from the
one end to the other. One thing I forgot to mention in my intial report was
that this was fairly good pass in that it only went into shadow at about 60
degree altitude. Just before it went into shadow did the leading end started
to appear wider than the trailling end, giving an almost 3D effect of the
structure. The whole event thus took a good few minutes to unfold. There
were also slight brightness variations along the lenght, as if the density
was not the same throughout.
One of the astronomers who observed this with us (a professor from Oxford)
did a quick calculation in his head (these guys are amasing) and determined
that the actual dump must have been about 100km in length!
To cap it all, we had a professional TV camera crew with us at the time (they
were filming this Prof's black hole research), uncluding the cameraman with
his camera all set up and ready on its tri-pod and he did not even attempt to
try and capture it on video! He said afterwards that it would not have
worked anyway being too faint - I surely would have tried anyway! Our head
office in Cape Town as well as the outstation here in Sutherland had to
answer quite a few phonecalls regarding this spectacle today.
Cheers
Willie
Willie Koorts wpk@saao.ac.za
Cape Town, Observatory 33d 56' 03"S 18d 28' 36"E GMT + 2h
Wellington, South Africa 33d 38' 56"S 19d 00' 52"E GMT + 2h
For - Amateur Astronomy - Telescope Making - Satellite Tracking -
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