[FPSPACE] Christmas mystery.....

[satcom]

Hi everyone,

Here's a little Christmas mystery.....

On the evening of December 19  I  shot a video of the Astra geostationary
satellite fleet over Europe  .
There are seven satellites in the group and they were imaged over a four
hour period .
Field  Of View was 30 arc minutes  ( half a degree) with GPS time stamp (
GMT )

Initially the moon was close by , so some of the birds were a little faint ,
but they soon came out to play ;o)

The four hours are compressed to a few seconds here :

http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/satcom_transits/astradance.gif

You can see just how much these birds move around in space

Part way through the observations I noticed a small object pass through the
FOV , moving north to south
When I isolated the incident , this is what I saw
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/satcom_transits/object1a.GIF

The object is moving too quickly for even an inclined geosat ( unless it has
an inclination of 10-15 degrees )
OIG has no known matches.

The videos are made up of 10 second exposures , with 10 seconds between each
frame.
You can see a number of star trails in the clips....the seven Astra birds
are grouped in a main cluster of six sats , with the seventh out to the east
and a little brighter ( Have a feeling there is a problem with that one as
it is outside the ITU control box )

Speed of object approx 1 degree every 16.66 minutes.

Orientation of images is true   ie north is top east is left.

The video has been examined by NEO experts who have ruled out a Near Earth
Object , although  2004 YD5
did zip through that evening .

There is a chance it could be a man made object at a range of 110-115,000 km
although thats unlikely.

Magnitude was about plus 12-14 and position at time of observation ( 2050
gmt ) Ra 3.54 Dec -7.31

My location....  3:05:30 W   53:23:15 N

Anyone have any ideas ?


Happy  Holidays

John