› Forums › General Discussion › Busy skies
- This topic has 7 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 2 years, 6 months ago by
Nick James.
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5 February 2022 at 11:05 am #575153
Nick James
ParticipantEach night my RMS meteor cameras produce a timelapse. Last night was pretty clear through the night so I’ve uploaded the timelapse from my SE camera (UK004E). This needs the focus tweaking but I don’t want to move it at the moment. It starts at dusk with Orion to the left and ends at dawn with Scorpius in the lower right corner and Venus rising to the left. The timelapse shows how busy the skies are from here and how sensitive IMX291 board cameras are, this one has a 6mm lens. Lots of aircraft and satellites and a few meteors but also quite a few interesting slow-moving flashers and GEO belt glints. There is a particularly interesting slow-moving, tumbling object in the lower left around 01:00 UTC and several slow moving pairs and triplets of objects.
https://www.nickdjames.com/meteor/timelapse/20220104_UK004E.mp4
It is 140MB. See what you can spot. I should be able to identify everything…
5 February 2022 at 1:51 pm #585205Dawson
ParticipantWhat is the object which appears about 49 seconds in an d vanishes about 52 seconds just to the west of HIP 45336, 22 Hya (top left qudrant of the image)?
5 February 2022 at 1:54 pm #585206Dawson
ParticipantAnd the crazy flashing thing bottom left quadrant from 1:36 to 1:57?
5 February 2022 at 2:30 pm #585207Peter Mulligan
ParticipantHi Nick it looks like something from Star wars!
5 February 2022 at 10:07 pm #585208Michael O’Connell
ParticipantNick,
Very nice video.
Query on the file size if you don’t mind please.
When I run the timelapse script, I get a much smaller file size (approx 30MB) – I’m running this on a Pi3.
Have you configured the settings to improve image quality or something (thereby resulting in a larger file size)?
Re focus, IIRC Denis recommends keeping the focus a little soft in order to improve magnitude estimation.
Regards,
Michael.
6 February 2022 at 8:17 am #585209Nick James
ParticipantIt is almost stationary in alt/az so must be near GEO. Candidates are Eutelsat W2, Telstar 6 and Meteosat 8. All three are drifting slowly slightly above GEO in the graveyard.
6 February 2022 at 8:45 am #585210Nick James
ParticipantThis one is drifting slowly in alt/az downwards and to the right. It is NORAD 21893 (Superbird B1) which was launched in 1992 and which is long defunct. It is in a highly inclined (14 deg) graveyard orbit. Uncontrolled GEOs are perturbed by lunar and solar gravity and their inclination drifts away from 0 deg.
6 February 2022 at 8:51 am #585211Nick James
ParticipantI run my RMS cameras at 1920×1080, the normal configuration is 1280×720. This increases the file size a bit. I also use ffmpeg at a higher quality level.
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