› Forums › General Discussion › Flaring of synchronous satellites from Kelling Heath › Double Flares
Nice videos!
I decided to look at the Sunday video in a little detail and so extracted 743 frames from it, starting at 378 (zero-offset),
i.e. 2021-10-10 22:25:10.656, covering the mainly clear period.
Using ImageJ to MAX-add the frame stack showed 14 GEOS away from the star trails. Further examination revealed a total of 26 flares in the 3h 10min covered.
Of particular interest is that three pixels of the video flare on two separate occasions.
Counting from the top-left corner these are (247,485) at 22:32 and 23:20, (255,656) at 00:32 and
00:51, and (259,617) at 00:35 and 00:51.
The first of these appears to be flares from unconnected satellites: the 22:32 flare is from Es’Hail 1 the second from
either Intelsat Hotbird 13E or Intelsat Hotbird 13B.
The second double-flare consists of 5th and 4th magnitude flares from Eutelsat 5 West A by my reckoning.
The third pair are both mag 3 and could originate from either Intelsat 1002 or MEV 2 or, indeed, one from each.
In the case of Eutelsat 5 West A, which seems to be responsible for both of the flares at (255,656), it is possible that the first
(mv = 5) brightening results from the general diffuse reflection of sunlight from the solar panels whereas the second, brighter, one is the actual specular glint from the panels. GEO phase functions having a peak either side of zero phase are not uncommon.
The following shows the traces of the second and third flare-pairs
.