Video of Metop-A (06-044A) flaring brilliantly

click images to enlarge

Metop-A (06-044A) is the first operational satellite in a planned series of European meteorological (weather) satellites. It was launched on 19 October 2006. Among satellite observers, it is known for frequently producing very bright flares. These flares occur when the solar panels reflect sunlight to the observer on Earth.

I captured such a flare with my video system yesterday evening: see the video above. The brilliant flare reached mag. -2 at 20:11:11.2 UTC (22 March 2012) and had a FWHM of 6.0 seconds.

Below the video is an integration of all the video frames, and a diagram of the brightness profile (made using LiMovie, wonderful software by Kazuhisa Miyashita). Camera was a WATEC 902H with Canon EF 2.0/35mm lens.

My GPS time-inserter unfortunately lost signal about a minute before the flare - hence why the display says "Bad GPS" in the video. Fortunately, in the preceding minutes I had recorded enough of time-signal in the video to extrapolate the time using the video frame rate. Hence, I am quite confident about the accuracy of the brightness profile.

Eternal circling of the sky - and a METOP-A flare

As I pointed out in my previous post, the evening of 19 September was reasonably clear (the odd streak of clouds every now and then).

After I observed USA 129 (and incidentally Topex flashing nicely, see previous post), I set up the camera with the automated wire release for a long series of images on the celestial pole, using the EF 2.8/24mm wide angle lens.

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 Result is above "classic" star trail image, showing the eternal circling of the sky around the celestial pole. It was constructed by stacking 165 images of 15 seconds each, shot over a time interval of 44 minutes. Note that the Polestar makes a small circle segment too - it is not exactly at the celestial pole.

The long crossing lines are aircraft (I am close to a major airport). The near-vertical trail in the upper left corner is a satellite flare however: the European weather satellite METOP-A (06-044A).

Below is a detail from the single image that showed the METOP-A flare (at about 20:37:55 UTC, 19 September). Very faintly, the double trail of a NOSS duo, NOSS 3-2 (03-054 A & C) can be seen as well. As this part of the image is close to the image edge, it suffers a bit from coma with this wide angle lens.

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In the old days of analogue photography, a 44 minute star trail image like this would not have been possible from my urban locality: the image would have fogged too much. Modern digital and especially image stacking techniques, make it possible.

KH-12 USA 129 and a Chinese rocket stage (CZ-2C r/b) cruising up together

Tuesday evening, the sky was very hazy and a waxing moon was high in the sky. Conditions were hence abominable, but I managed to capture both evening KH-12's, USA 129 (96-072A) and USA 186 (05-042A). The pictures are not pretty, as they are quite fogged.

The pass of USA 129 was confusing, as a second bright object close to it was moving parallel to it: at the moment of observation, I was not sure which object was the Keyhole and what the other object was! It took me rather by surprise (and as a result, I mis-aligned the camera for the second image, resulting in only one image).

It turned out to be a Chinese Long March rocket stage, a CZ-2C r/b (09-061B) from the launch of Shijian 11-01 on November 12, 2009. Below is the image, showing them cruising up together in a moon-fogged sky:

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A few days earlier, on 11 March, I observed USA 186 (05-042A), Lacrosse 5 (05-016A) and the USA 144 Decoy (99-028C). I obtained a series of images on the latter, and hopefully these can be employed for a brightness variation reconstruction again (to be reported on later, after I have had some time to do the analysis).

Lacrosse 5 was racing against an untimely field of clouds that evening, yielding this picture of a bright satellite trail and a wisp of moving cloud:

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The satellite did it's "disappearance trick" again during culmination north, reappearing very brightly for a brief period after it.

Earlier that evening, in a still mostly clouded sky, I saw METOP-A flaring brightly to at least -3 at about 20:09:20 UTC (March 11).

Another METOP-A flare, hazy skies and timings again

The skies have turned hazy since yesterday. With the moon and the urban environment, this means serious tracking is very difficult.

I observed another flare of METOP-A (06-044A) yesterday (25 Apr) at 20:08:42 UTC. I watched this pass because the track and time were very close to that of the flare observation of the 20th.

Indeed, it flared at virtually the same spot, in the tail of the Big Dipper. Due to the conditions the brightness was difficult to estimate: certainly mag. 0, possibly -1. With the naked eye I could barely make out the dipper stars itself, but the flare was easily visible.

There are still some strange things going on with my timings. I have chosen to target as many non-classifieds as possible to get some insight into the timing consistency.

Bonus flare of unknown (=Metop-A) with USA 129 (UPDATED)

"Something" just produced a fine mag. -1.5 flare only a few degrees from USA 129. I have not identified the flaring object yet. I could see the two cruise up with each other on roughly parallel tracks, a few degrees apart, USA 129 at +2.5, in Ursa Major. The flarer was leading and produced the flare at 20:12:10 UTC. See image below. The fainter trail is USA 129.

USA 129 itself (I believe) produced a flare of mag. 0 low in the east at about 20:11:00 and remained bright for tens of seconds after that. I catched it still being +1 some 20 seconds later.

More later, including (I hope) the flarer ID after I have measured the image and have dan an ID run with the positions.

Update: the flaring object is identified as Metop-A, 06-044A. With thanks to Russell Eberst and Arnold Barmettler.

(click image to enlarge)