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Old July 14th 07, 08:49 PM posted to sci.astro.satellites.visual-observe
DougD
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Posts: 19
Default I saw something!

In article , Skywise wrote:

How fast? Sat's take minutes to cross the entire sky. Only
the really low (about to reenter) ones zip by with much
speed, and then were still talking about a minute.

If what you saw only lasted seconds, it was most likely a
meteor - especially if it left a "line path" in the sky.

Brian


I was kinda curious about the "line path" part of his sighting as well.
However, as far as the speed, the Iridium's can appear to be a fairly
fast moving object, depending on where you are viewing it from. Keep
in mind that depending on the background light, etc. that sometimes
it's not possible to actually spot an iridium until it's started it's flare,
so that the normal transit time of maybe a few minutes gets cut down
to the 15-25 seconds when it's most visible. Also, the apparent speed
increases as it moves overhead compared to when they first come up
over the horizon. I've been lucky to have had a few years viewing them
from first my home when it was in Minnesota, to now where I'm on
Vancouver Island, and there's quite a bit of difference in the "experience"
between the two. In the case of Mn, I was able to see quite a few daylight
iridium passes, where here I've not been able to see any, they are just
in the wrong part of the sky at that time of the day. They're still up there,
they still produce a flare, but the background light is just too bright to try
and pick them up. So, who knows what he's seeing, the easiest way to
figure it out is to look up some in the prediction software and then see
if they coincide, although I've even gotten that wrong on occasion and
was looking at a completely different satellite than an iridium. That's
also how I found that "tethered" satellite (if that's what it was), which
still has me fairly amazed at having seen something like that, just so
odd.. A triangle of sat's all travelling at the same speed relative to each
other.

D.