What are these objects?

lior · Post by **lior** » Fri Sep 24, 2004 4:34 pm

There are two bright objects near the north star. We could guess they are meteors or satellite glints, but if that was the case, we should have seen them also at Haleakala. The fact that these objects are at a low altitude north to Mauna Kea but still not seen at Haleakala implies that these objects are very low.

RJN · Post by **RJN** » Fri Sep 24, 2004 5:38 pm

I don't know but perhaps the long faint line(s) on the very next image provide some sort of clue:

- RJN

lior · Post by **lior** » Fri Sep 24, 2004 5:57 pm

I'm not sure about that. I think that the long line is the international space station, and it appears both at Haleakala and Mauna Kea. It's hard to get parallax of that one because it is just a long line which doesn't have a "handle". Anyway, that object seems to be at about the same order of the altitude of the object from my previous post, which is several hundreds kilometers.

tilvi · Post by **tilvi** » Fri Sep 24, 2004 8:04 pm

lior wrote:I'm not sure about that. I think that the long line is the international space station, and it appears both at Haleakala and Mauna Kea. It's hard to get parallax of that one because it is just a long line which doesn't have a "handle". Anyway, that object seems to be at about the same order of the altitude of the object from my previous post, which is several hundreds kilometers.

These seems to be the the ISS.
Below is the image of ISS track, though few hours later then that of MK image.

ISS orbit tracker at
http://science.nasa.gov/realtime/JTrack/Spacecraft.html

lior · Post by **lior** » Sat Sep 25, 2004 3:41 pm

Tilvi,

Your charts show that it is the ISS on the second picture, but it cannot be the ISS in the first one. The two objects in the first frame are much lower.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 9:20 pm

Here it is again

tilvi · Post by **tilvi** » Tue Sep 28, 2004 2:58 am

Is that HST?

tilvi · Post by **tilvi** » Fri Oct 01, 2004 1:33 am

Here are the two images from MK & HL. Circled are the objects seen in both images with a time delay of ~4 minutes. My primary guess is that it might be HST, ISS or ....?

Here are the Fits files:
http://nightskylive.net/hl/hl040927/hl0 ... 3912p.fits
http://nightskylive.net/mk/mk040927/mk0 ... 4307p.fits

tilvi · Post by **tilvi** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:34 am

Are these objects airplanes? Below two images at HL station on two different consecutive nights shows the objects almost at same location (left of constellation capricorn) on the image, though with some time difference.

http://nightskylive.net/hl/hl041005/hl0 ... 54301p.jpg

http://nightskylive.net/hl/hl041006/hl0 ... 53508p.jpg

lior · Post by **lior** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 1:44 pm

These objects aren't airplanes. I am almost sure this is an Iridium satelite.

Starship Asterisk*