Artificial Satellite question...

[AndyTee (Andy)]

Satellite spotting has become a bit of a 'thing' for me lately, but tonight I saw something strange...

I am certain I viewed Cosmos 2227 through Sagittarius and down to about 40 deg elevation in the south-east. The strange thing is that for the entire time I viewed it, its path was paralleled by 'something else'. The 'something' was pretty close - thumbs width at arm's length - and may have diverged very slightly as they travelled, but not by much. Presumably the 'something' was another satellite, but Heaven's Above provides no clue as to what it might have been, nothing else on remotely the same path as 2227 was predicted.

Couple of questions:

Heavens Above predicted a magnitude of 4.1. No way I spotted that with naked eye in Sag with a quarter moon in Scorpio. Is it possible for 'moonshine' to add to the mag?

I have no idea if it is even possible, but could the 'something' have been a reflection - and if so, reflected off what??

Andy

[racecar (David)]

I am very new to astronomy, and know little about it, but no one has replied so here goes. I have been getting double images of Venus when photographing through a DSLR at certain apertures. Not sure if it is the same thing you are getting here.

If you have images of it, try and see if the two objects are equally opposite of the centre of the picture, both in vector and distance. In my case, with Venus, the shadow imaged moved closer to Venus with time (as Venus approached the centre), however, if you were tracking with it, the shadow image may have been moving with you.

I believe the effect might be lens flare. Are you using a refractive telescope?

[astroron (Ron)]

Andy, sorry no one replied to your post, probably means no one is sure
With a few thousand Satellites up there quite a few military, Chinese,USA, Russia ect. These countries do not always give out information as to their satellites.
Heavens Above is not always upto date with it's information
Try googling some of the other satellite tracking sites , like NASA
for more info.
Cheers

[luigi]

You can also try calsky.com to see if it has some extra information.
Maybe an atmospheric effect?

[astroron (Ron)]

Originally Posted by luigi

You can also try calsky.com to see if it has some extra information.
Maybe an atmospheric effect?

Luis, I was going to mention CalSky , but as I haven't used it for a long time i didn't

[luigi]

I used calsky last week and it was very accurate with Iridium flares for Buenos Aires, both time, azimuth and altitude were spot-on.

[Alchemy (Clive)]

Its going to be difficult to identify, I use the voyager program, which has a realtime database of 685 satellites, this would only be a fraction of whats up there, and even with that many the sky is quite a busy place, there are unserviceable derelicts, military, gps, communications, plus, plus, plus.

If it tracked and diverged slightly, it's just another satellite,

Happy hunting.

[Kevnool (Kev)]

I reckon i saw that tuesday morning at about 5.30 as you described but they were very bright and following each other right through orion.

Cheers Kev.

[gary]

Hi Andy,

The rocket booster of Cosmos 2777 fragmented on four occassions
into an observed debris cloud of 225 pieces.

See page 320 of -
http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/li...reakupBook.pdf

So if you were observing Cosmos 2227 R/B, which is cataloged
as #22285, then it may have been a debris fragment.

However, if they were diverging, then it would be more likely another
satellite and these types of events happen now and then. For example,
see http://www.algonet.se/~b_gimle/encountr.htm where Cosmos
1833 and 2227 were observed close together in 1997.