Monday, 27 December 2010

OT: (3200) Phaethon, the Geminid meteor shower parent body

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This is somewhat Off-Topic as it doesn't concern satellites. It does however concern two other astronomical interests of me: meteors and...
Thursday, 23 December 2010

A second NROL-41 (FIA Radar 1) patch

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Grey overcast skies and snow do not allow observations currently. South-African observations by Ian Roberts show that PAN was still driftin...
Wednesday, 15 December 2010

When did PAN start to drift?

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click diagram to enlarge Answer: on December 1st. Which tallies with it still being at her old position at 38.0 deg E on November 28 .
Tuesday, 14 December 2010

A satellite in the "fish mouth" of Orion's nebula, and nine geosats in one image

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Sunday evening, I shot a number of images of the geostationary belt in Orion using the Carl Zeiss Jena 2.8/180 mm lens. This yielded amongst...

Mystery satellite "UNKNOWN 101208" is PAN!

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Those of you following this observing blog and the Satobs list, will be aware of the observations of the past week of what appeared to be an...
Sunday, 12 December 2010

Recovering SDS 3-3 (USA 179) and following the UNKNOWN 101208 geosat

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Our amateur network had lost track recently of the HEO satellite SDS 3-3 ( USA 179 , 2004-034A), so it had to be recovered. Radio doppler s...
Friday, 10 December 2010

Update on the UNID geostationary: Greg observed it too!

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On the evening of December 8, while imageing PAN, I captured an unknown object, apparently in a geostationary orbit, close to the commercial...
Thursday, 9 December 2010

Again Terra SAR-X and TanDEM-X, and a rich batch of

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Yesterday evening was a very dynamic evening, where conditions changed from clear to clouded to clear in matters of minutes. Besides the une...

[UPDATED] An unidentified Geostationary or GTO object

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UPDATE 9/12/2010: Ted Molczan has identified the object as being likely DSCS 3-11 (00001A / 26052), last seen 178 days ago at another posi...
Monday, 29 November 2010

PAN and other geostationary satellites in a frosty winter sky

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Last Sunday evening, the pass of the Terra SAR X and Tandem X close duo posted earlier here and a pass of Lacrosse 4 shortly after that,...

Terra SAR X and Tandem X flying in formation (and flaring!)

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Over the past months, the two German remote sensing research satellites Tandem X and Terra SAR X (2010-030A and 2007-026A) operated by the...
Thursday, 18 November 2010

Senegalese skies

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I spent the first half of this month in Africa, in Senegal, where I took part in the 2010 PANAF/Safa conference (PANAF = Pan-African Archaeo...
Wednesday, 20 October 2010

SDS 3-4 (USA 179)

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The image below is a part (at 100% pixel resolution) of one out of a series of images I took Sunday evening, using the Carl Zeiss Jena Sonna...
Tuesday, 19 October 2010

2003 dreams and 2010 facts about the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) satellites

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This article published in 2003 in the Army Space Journal contains the following quote on page 5 (lower part first column), regarding the F...
Sunday, 17 October 2010

Again the FIA Radar 1 (NROL-41)

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Last night was frosty and very, very clear. In the evening, I took pictures of the KH-12 USA 129 (96-072A), the HEO SDS 3-4 USA 179 (04-03...
Wednesday, 13 October 2010

At last the FIA Radar 1 (NROL-41), and the first images with the new Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar MC 2.8/180

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Last weekend saw my first observation, at last, of the payload of the NROL-41 launch: the FIA Radar 1 (2010-046A). At 4:25 am local time it...
Thursday, 30 September 2010

BWGS meeting, 26 September 2010, and 2010 observations so far

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I. The BWGS meeting On September 26, 8 members of the BWGS (the Belgian Satellite Workgroup, which also includes the active Dutch observer...
Monday, 20 September 2010

SJ-6F and SJ-12: Close Encounters of a Chinese kind

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On August 19th, two Chinese unmanned spacecraft, Shijian SJ-6F (08-053B) and SJ-12 (10-027A) , met in space for what seems to be a deliberat...
Saturday, 11 September 2010

Spectacular Keyhole appearances

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The KH-12 Keyholes USA 129 (96-072A) and USA 186 (05-042A) delivered some spectacular views in the early part of September. USA 129 was ma...
Tuesday, 7 September 2010

Again the USA 144 (Misty-2) Decoy brightness variability, with another specular glint

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Since about a year, I am regularly targetting the enigmatic object (related to what was probably the Misty-2 stealth satellite launch) we ...