Friday 28 August 2009

The Terra (EOS AM-1) satellite, IGS 1B near M31, and more

Yesterday evening the street lights went out in town, due to some malfunction. This made my sky a bit darker than usual.

I captured the KH-12 Keyhole USA 186 (05-042A) in late twilight, followed by a fine pass of IGS 1B (03-009B) some 45 minutes later. It was very bright and on one of the images I captured it passing M31, the Andromeda galaxy.

Click image to enlarge



Later that night (with the streetlights on again) I imaged the USA 144 decoy (99-028C) passing through northwest Pegasus. In one of the images, the Terra (EOS AM-1) satellite (99-068A) was captured as a bright stray as well. This satellite carries the ASTER and MODIS remote sensing sensors well-known to Earth scientists. They were used a.o. to create the Blue Marble images of the Earth.

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