I received the following account of a solar transit. Might it have been a satellite? Ed Cannon - ecannon@mail.utexas.edu - Austin, Texas, USA > observation I made last October 5. I was observing > the Sun with a 4" inch refractor and sun filter at > about 100x. I observed a disk-like object cross the > sun. It crossed in about 4 seconds, and was approx > 30" in size, seemed to move geometrically straight and > uniformly, moving approx sw to ne. It passed near a > sunspot, whose size I measured, so I think my size > estimate is very good. The timing was rougher, since > I was totally surprised. The date was 5 Oct 2002 > approx 3pm Austin time [20:00 Oct 5 2002 UTC]. > > The angular speed of the object was about 8'/sec, > which corresponds to a satellite in a circular orbit > of 3000 km. An immediate problem is that an object > with its angular size would be about 500 meters across. > Even in a low (300 km altitude) orbit, it would have > to be 50 m across. I am not aware of anything "up > there" that is near that size, so Earth satellite > seems an improbable explanation. Further out, the > object would get to be large enough to be a trackable > asteroid. At aircraft altitude, I should have > resolved it easily in my scope, and the resulting > speeds are actually rather low for aircraft. Birds > that flew through my FOV moved several times faster > than the object. ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Mar 17 2003 - 02:01:49 EST