Starship Asterisk*

A bright meteor looks to be originating from Gemini constellations.

http://nightskylive.net/hl/hl041208/hl0 ... 24451p.jpg


http://nightskylive.net/hl/hl041208/hl0 ... 53819p.jpg

Another Geminids from CP
http://nightskylive.net/cp/cp041211/cp0 ... 35236p.jpg

The light curve looks a little too symmetric to be a meteor, but it occurs near the time of the Geminids meteor shower and points near the constellation of Gemini!

- RJN

Half way between the center and the top of the frame.

- RJN

To the right of Rigel:

- RJN

A double? To the right of Canopus:

- RJN

Just under the green "Lepus" label. The center part is just smearing due to water on the lens. This was found by playing the movie:

- RJN

[img]http://nightskylive.net/wo/wo041212/wo0 ... 30120a.jpg


is that a geminid? or just a jet?[/img]

Hi cadarado,

Great find! I'm not sure what that is! It is now a candidate for the second brightest meteor even seen by the Night Sky Live project!

On the "yes, it is a meteor" side, the trail is smooth and shows no lights blinking like an airplane. Also, it appears to fade out on the southern end.

On the "no, it is not a meteor" side, the trail appears to start (end?) abruptly at the northern end. The trail does not obviously point to Gemini -- it might even be too early for Gemini to be in the sky. It could still be and "Earth-grazer" if Gemini is on the horizon, though -- I'd have to check.

BTW, the way to display an image from the NSL site is to put the image tags directly before and after the JPG image code like this: That is how I am displaying the image you found again:


- RJN

I would say that what we're seeing is an Iridium flare.

I looked it up on Heaven's Above and it looks like from Tel Aviv there occured an Iridium flare expected from Iridium 45 at magnitude 6 at the time of the image exposure: http://www.heavens-above.com/iridium.as ... 7593518519

This flare was expected to start at 5:03am local time which would be about 3:03 UT on 12/12/2004 (exposure is 3 minutes long). The flare was expected at altitude 11deg and azimuth 62deg.

That puts the flare starting near the star Izar in the constellation Bootes, which is what the image shows as well.

The website also shows that the flare was travelling in a southerly direction, which is what we see in the image.

Sorry all. Not a meteor.

Daniel

Also, generally the abrupt nature of the flare has to do with the satellite coming out of the earth's shadow. Did not verify if this is the case here, but I expect that it's true for this "meteor".

Dan,
Many times an abrupt trail end on an NSL image just means that the exposure started or ended when the trail was being made. Most NSL exposures are 180 seconds, but usually only 20 seconds when the Moon is up. Iridium flares are usually pretty quick, but can last 30 seconds or so. So it might be either an integration edge of a shadow.
- RJN

It's too bad that the Heaven's Above site doesn't do an all sky map for the Iridium flares as it does the regular satellites. Then we might be able to see when it came out of the shadow.

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