*Dear Sat observers:* *I was sent a curious photo of a sighting which looks either a satellite flare or a meteor fall. The second hypothesis looks easier because **that night **there were two radiant points (Virginids) exactly in the same quadrant.* *I wanted to submit the photo to your keen eyes to see if someone could help me out to solve this mistery.* *The picture was taken from coordinates:* *S 40° 56´53" - W 68° 12´31" (From National road 23 south from the town of Los Menucos, Argentina)* *General Azimuth: Northeast quadrant. For the azimuths of the start and end of the trail please refer to the second attached picture with the Astrometry obtained by my collaborator Walter Elias.* *Elevation: very low above the horizon as you´ll see.* *The date is 2018 /Apr/1 at 09:01 PM local time (UTC -3, which means 00:01 AM the next day if you use UTC).* *In this link you´ll find the original picture * * http://satobs.org/seesat_ref/misc/FOTO_CASO_NELSA_CARMODI.jpg <http://satobs.org/seesat_ref/misc/FOTO_CASO_NELSA_CARMODI.jpg> * *Unfortunately it came out a little bit blurred at the beginning of the exposure (which was 13 second ) and the same blurring of the stars affected the left tip (beginning of the trail/flare). The woman/witness and photographer, said she was preparing her camera for doing night shooting and all of the sudden she started to see the luminous trail. She immediately grabbed the camera and took the shot before it was over. The whole thing lasted for about four seconds (she didn´t say if the camera was hand held or had resourced to put it on top of a tripod or the top of the car). To the four seconds of the trace she photographed, you have to add perhaps a second or two during which she first saw it and reacted to grab the camera.* *I also attached the original picture with the Astrometry (by Walter Elias)* * http://satobs.org/seesat_ref/misc/FOTO_CASO_NELSA_CARMODI_ASTROMETRIA.jpg <http://satobs.org/seesat_ref/misc/FOTO_CASO_NELSA_CARMODI_ASTROMETRIA.jpg> * *and also a Stellarium simulation for the location, day and time.* * http://satobs.org/seesat_ref/misc/Stellarium_caso_Nelsa_Carmodi.jpg <http://satobs.org/seesat_ref/misc/Stellarium_caso_Nelsa_Carmodi.jpg> * * I found some trouble having my Stellarium able to upload the recent Iridiums (I know the Iridium constellation has grown up to # 166 by now) that is why I didn´t find any Iridium in that quadrant, so I didn´t use the satellite tool in this simulation. * * I then run a simulation on Orbitron with a freshly updated TLE full catalog from space-track and it shows for that night that Iridium 113 was passing East of Argentina at that time. But 113 was too high in the sky for such an image near the horizon like the one under analysis. * *I have thousands of sats in the recently updated TLEs and find it cumbersome to plot each and every sat on the screen which not only would saturate the display but also would take hours to find which one had the West edge of its footprint passing over the location the photo was taken. If this is the method some of you are using and it bears fruit, I am all ears !* *If this trail was caused by a sat flare I would much like to find the culprit. Any suggestions will be more than welcome. I would also appreciate if any of you can help me by sending a list of non-Iridium flare producers. I read about sporadic cases of some very intense non-Iridium flares.* *Thanks in advance for your help and keep up the great job !* *Best regards* *Ruben* _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-lReceived on Mon Aug 27 2018 - 07:16:55 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Mon Aug 27 2018 - 12:16:56 UTC