Unknown Satellite Crossing The Sun

reply to post by jaws1975


Perhaps it's one of these Astrium satellites - the boom could be a solar panel viewed from the side:

www.astrium.eads.net...

(The video worth watching - not just for the techical information, but to see a white-coat engineer balance on one foot on a step ladder while trying to insert a component

There's a list of satellites here:

space.skyrocket.de...

The limit of the size of the satellite is based on the size of the largest rockets available. Let's say that the average size of the satellite is 1.5 meters diameter, then the boom would be about 4 meters, which is around the size of a regular solar panel. You really only need a nuclear power source if your satellite consumes large amounts of power, such as a radar system. Then that would explain the boom, the cone shape and the transit across the Sun. It's a military or commercial radar mapping satellite.

smurfy
FAlconsat 3 carried a boom like that, plus a small bar at the end of the boom. The satellite operates in LOE, and since its pretty small it might just appear like that in a telescope.

Falconsat 5/US221 is another, but it is secret, (sort of) and not much info on that.

One thing is sure, nothing we make could withstand that heat, looks pretty close to me lol.

The Bot

reply to post by bottleslingguy


I don't know, but do we know if this image has been taken from earth or space,? If it's from Earth its possible that it's a wandering satellite
That coincidentally flew past the observatory? just try to find the most logical explanation. . l hope it's some alien craft ? But we've seen al the moon shots but none of them have been classified Alien in origen. ..

Ross 54
Very interesting thread. The object reportedly traveled 1 degree per second. It appears to take about two second for it to complete its motion in the video. This is obviously slowed down, as the real time span is given as 36 milliseconds. The slowed down version is, then, about 55 times slower than the original. From the claimed true speed of the object, and how long it really takes the main body (the round part) to move across its own diameter, I surmise that it is about 45 arc seconds across.

A satellite in low Earth orbit would have to be rather large to present such a sight. I estimate that at 125 miles altitude it would have to be about 135 feet across; at 250 miles 270 feet in diameter, and so forth. The 'boom' would have to be much longer, in either case. In the likely event that someone can point to an error in my math, please do so.

edit on 3-12-2013 by Ross 54 because: adjusted figure to eliminate implication of unobtainable precision

edit on 3-12-2013 by Ross 54 because: improved paragraph structure

edit on 3-12-2013 by Ross 54 because: improved syntax

edit on 3-12-2013 by Ross 54 because: corrected erroneous size figures

We don't know the OPTICS used so we don't know the field of view so you cant work anything out re size

Ikonoklast is right. One degree per second implies a speed too great for a satellite orbiting Earth. It would have escaped Earth at a far greater speed than we can currently propel a space vessel. A tiny object very near the observatory should at least be considered. At 40 feet distance, a two inch diameter object would appear the correct size. It would be moving at about 20 miles per hour. Perhaps a leaf caught in the wind? Maybe the 'boom' is a strand of spiderweb clinging to it? I doubt this, of course, as the shape of the object seems too consistent for a fluttering leaf, but perhaps it wouldn't flutter much in only 36 one thousandths of a second?

reply to post by skyblueworld


I'm afraid "Deny Ignorance" has become "Stick your head in the sand".

Here's a close-up view of OP's picture.



Now let's wait for the very same serial debunkers to repeat themselves and ad hominem until they're blue in the face.

Soylent Green Is People

cantsee4looking
thats one big satellite....??

I can't tell how far "zoomed in" we are seeing the Sun or how magnified the telescopic image is, so we can't tell how big the satellite is compared to the Sun. Plus, we don't know if that satellite is in low Earth orbit, medium orbit, or a high Earth orbit -- and the difference could be 20,000+ miles from the camera.

Here is how big the ISS looks compared to the Sun (this picture taken as the space station and the docked shuttle "Endeavor" passed between the Sun and a telescope

But with a more powerful telescope or a more zoomed-in image, the space station could look larger.

edit on 12/3/2013 by Soylent Green Is People because: (no reason given)

This picture proves my point, imagine zooming in on the above picture, what do you think would happen? The ISS would get larger as well, now if you zoomed in to the point of where the op picture is how big do you think the ISS would be? It probably wouldn't even fit on the screen.

This seems to be pretty common sense, and I'm not that smart, so can any amueter astronomers weigh in here so we can stop talking about earth orbit satellite's?

As long as we have a reasonably accurate figure for the apparent size of the object, we can project its true size, if we assign it a specific distance. The discussion had turned to low Earth orbit satellites, so I specified the true size at LEO distances of 125 and 250 miles altitude. At higher altitudes the object would have to be larger-- around 500 feet in diameter at 500 miles altitude and 1100 feet at 1000 miles, in order to present the correct apparent size.
By the way, as there is some confusion on this point. The images were made at the Burleith Observatory, in Washington DC.

I tried to search for this picture based off of the source provided and interestingly enough I wasn't able to find sources with this image/GIF and the supposed credentials (of it's being from an observatory) other then on sites like "godlikeproductions" or "ufodigest"..

Seems pretty shady to me, but if this is actually real and this picture is really of something in space by the sun, then why is it such a big deal or shocker? Why can't it be a satellite or something similar from NASA that this individual, whom I still am unable to find any validity regarding, just does not know about? If not NASA, why couldn't it be some satellite that Russia has out there, for example?

People don't know and aren't supposed to know (due to the some times secret nature of technology and it's whereabouts) where everything is, let alone in space...

I really don't see what the big deal is here even if this is a real photo, it's just something that people aren't aware of.. Like many things.. If it's something other then what I described above, what is the logic behind that? People are saying UFO, UFO!, but really, I don't think that an obviously far more advanced group of beings would care to probe one of the trillions of stars in our galaxy with an instrument that is identical to what we use today in our not even developed (in comparison) attempts at space exploration..

"Deny disinformation and ignorance"? I agree, lets.. Ehemm..

TrueBrit
reply to post by UnmitigatedDisaster

 

The object does not "appear from nowhere". The GIF is very short, and clearly does not comprise the entire appearance of this object, through the scope. The recording may have only been started just shortly before the object left the field of view, and if a dedicated observation of the sun was in progress, then no matter how interesting this object was, it would not warrant a change in the orientation of the scope to follow it.

The person who captured this object through their scope, probably hit record just to confirm that the thing was actually there, and not a fleeting mirage or some nonsense. In any case, the GIF shows only a fraction of the procession of this object across the face of the sun. It does not show the object merely appearing mid frame, as if by magic.

Just a little bit of common sense would be nice folks, you know, like we used to have around here as a matter of course?

It is pretty sad you had to explain that to ATS members. Very sad indeed. Even more sad that others had to explain that we don't know the distance of the object from the camera, so we will never know the size. You have to say it in caveman talk: "Object close; looks big. Object far; looks small." ...

Anyone else see another boom like thingy the opposite of the long one? About 1/4 it's length.

Think Japan has a sun viewing satellite. Might be it?

As for the speed being assumed to be way faster than normal, if that thing is a regular satellite, it is way closer than assumed. With the telescope being zoomed/fixated on sunspots, the optics will give the illusion of it traveling faster than it really is due to its fixated point.

Not sure this has been mentioned yet...

I read the .gif with a program to read the number of frames, and frame time delay for each frame.

There are 21 frames. The delay between each frame is 70 milliseconds.

Frame time delay can be modified per frame when creating a .gif, and the times are saved in the .gif itself.

If that camera captured 21 frames in 36 milliseconds. That is 0.583 milliseconds per frame. That is about a 1715 FPS camera.... that is high speed.

In all honesty, it looks more like they converted a low quality video to a .gif without changing any delay settings.

21 frames, 70 ms each, that is 21 frames in 1470ms. That is about a 14.28 FPS camera. Either they uses a low quality 15 FPS camera, or they got a standard 29 or 30 FPS camera, and when converting to .gif they dropped every other frame (in half) to get 15 FPS video.

For what it's worth, I think the sunspot group we see in the image is AR1909.

Perhaps there is a way of getting measurements of one of the sunspots in that group and then we would have a scale to work on.

Also, I notice a few comments about the object moving 1 degree per second. That's not 1 degree per second across the sun, that's 1 degree per second across the FOV of the telescope, so if you were to view it with your own eyes moving across your FOV horizon to horizon (180 degrees), it would take 180 seconds to do that.

With a large dish and long boom arm this vehicle would be very reminiscent of the voyager probes which would be strange considering the voyagers were 1970s technology designed for long distance exploration.

most modern orbiting satellite usually have the 2 large rectangular solar panel arrays

reply to post by skyblueworld


Turn it upside down and it looks like the silhouette of a parachute with something dangling off the end of it.

The Burleith Observatory in Washington DC is a real astronomical observatory, registered with the Astrophysics Data System maintained by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and NASA. I find a number of reports filed by this observatory in this data system. They all bear the name R.E. Schmidt, which is, I assume, the same person as Richard Schmidt who reported on his observation of this mysterious object on Dec. 1st. He filed this report with Space Weather.com, which is a legitimate, science based astronomy site on the web.
adsabs.harvard.edu...
www.spaceweather.com...

AlphaHawk
Perhaps there is a way of getting measurements of one of the sunspots in that group and then we would have a scale to work on.

Going to the SDO website, I grabbed an image of the sun on that day and printed it out on paper.

Using the sunspots as a reference, I estimated that on my printout the satellite moved 6mm on a Sun disk of size 197mm.
Or... the satellite moved 1/32.833th the distance across the sun during the course of that video.

The video is said to be 32ms long.
That means the satellite would take 1050ms to cross the whole disk of the sun.
Taking an approximation of half a degree for the sun, it is thefore going to take 2100ms (2.1 seconds) to cross 1 degree of sky.

(0.476 degrees/second, or 0.00831 radians per second.)

-------

The speed of a satellite crossing the sky depends on its altitude, and also its angular height above your horizon. I have no way of knowing how high the sun was above the observatory when the images were taken, but using the techniques on this document, a first approximation for the height of the satellite, moving at that speed, is
890 km.

amurphy245
reply to post by intrptr

 

Interesting theory ,my first thought was asteroid but then I saw the "boom" ,we will likely never know what it was.

Boom or not, it is unlikely an asteroid - or at least one in the asteroid belt. Since the earth is between the sun and the asteroid belt, we could never view an asteroid traversing the sun. It would always be behind the sun from our vantage point.

Very strange….hm. ALIENS. haha