Unknown Satellite Crossing The Sun

reply to post by MadHatter364

How did they manage to record that, are they using high speed cameras to record the surface of the Sun? It doesn't really make sense...

Yeah I thought that was a little strange myself. This seems to be from the U.S. Naval Observatory though and I don't know what they have.

If this is indeed from Richard Schmidt at the USNO in D.C. he has 38 years in there from what I read.

wait , wasn't that Mork's egg ?



but really how can we tell if it was huge ? i mean we don't know for sure how far is it but really interesting

Its a lens flare, a dead pixil, some dust in the camera, an "artifact", a glitch, a hoax, anything BUT an unidentified real physical object. Just like all other mysterious images of stuff in space, none of it is real. Anything that can't be explained away in prosaic terms is by definition fake.

I'm confused about their report of timing as well. Thirty-six milliseconds seems awfully quick for the number of frames presented.

Also, why does it seem to appear from nowhere? Assuming that the gif was the entire sequence then the dot with a line appeared out of no where and moved across.

I'm not an expert at all, so maybe that's why it doesn't make sense to me; but it doesn't make me think of anything fantastical being likely either.

reply to post by skyblueworld


It's the island in the sun, there just playing and having fun.

When your on a golden sea, you don't need no memory.

As you drift into the zone.

The "arm" looks oddly like a shadow, though I know that can't be possible. The person who observed it thought it was a satellite -- given how many satellites are bumping around up there, there would need to be at least a few other similar images, yet he seems to think it is remarkable and out of the ordinary. I'm not sure what that means.

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?

rickymouse
How come this artifact appears in the middle of the field, it is like it was created there? A possible reflection?

We have just a few frames on a gif image, what happened before the gif starts we don't know, since the gif doesn't include those frames it looks like it suddenly appears there, but that's just because that's the first frame captured on the gif.

Also the gif is repeating over and over, that helps in creating the effect that you see of suddenly appearing in the middle.

Edit: What Intrptr says two down...

A secret sat ... and possibly an answer to the ufo with an "arm" sticking out of it seen by astronauts.

Here we go again. "I bet it's Nibiru or the mothership coming to take us home!!" Speculation over some sort of camera noise or artifact. It's nothing!

The number of frames and the fact they are using a high speed camera doesn't really strike me as that odd. When you're recording the sun, something that can have fast changing events, you want to make sure you capture alot of it, especially when its for science. A 36 milisecond clip with 18 frames comes out to a 500 FPS(1000/36*18=500), so its not even a high-end high speed camera.

reply to post by skyblueworld


Its a satellite. The nuclear battery is out at the end of the boom. The boom arm puts distance between the battery and the onboard instruments to prevent interference from ionizing radiation emitted by the battery.

I saw a satellite transit the moon thru my telescope once. It hard solar panels though, not a nuclear power source.

Usually, satellites bound for the outer reaches of the Solar system utilize nuclear power sources because the suns energy is to weak to power solar cells.

Why this one is orbiting earth with a nuclear battery is…

classified, probably.

Maybe it's Thor's hammer

Thanks Kaifan for the explanation

HEY! That's where my satellite went! Get it down from there!!

intrptr
reply to post by skyblueworld

 

Its a satellite. The nuclear battery is out at the end of the boom. The boom arm puts distance between the battery and the onboard instruments to prevent interference from ionizing radiation emitted by the battery.

I saw a satellite transit the moon thru my telescope once. It hard solar panels though, not a nuclear power source.

Usually, satellites bound for the outer reaches of the Solar system utilize nuclear power sources because the suns energy is to weak to power solar cells.

Why this one is orbiting earth with a nuclear battery is…

classified, probably.

Maybe it was an early test of a nuclear power source; they just put it on a satellite and monitored how much power it produced, and for how long.

Looks like a very old kind of satellite, probably Soviet (they loved spherical shape for their spacecraft).

reply to post by intrptr


The telescope is zoomed in observing sun spots, don't you think that a satellite orbiting earth would be much much bigger if it was to transit across the telescopes line of sight?

skyblueworld
I'll have to use George Lucas's fiction to come up with an answer...


Probe Droid.

Dear God Darth Vader has found me !!

Time for me to fire up the A-Wing, I'm outta here ...

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

Also why is it that with nearly every thread on ats half the posts are people trying to be funny cracking lame jokes and posting silly pictures?

It's also worth noting that a lot of Sats. use what is called a gravity gradient boom, for Attitude control.
Putting a mass out on a boom like that can help with orientation.

Here are a bunch of images of what that can look like.
Gravity Gradient Boom

It's a very common technique.

It looks like an old satellite. Check out Vanguard 1. It was launched in '58 and is still in orbit as of 2009.

- en.wikipedia.org...

Here is an excerpt from the wiki page on satellites.

"When satellites reach the end of their mission, satellite operators have the option of de-orbiting the satellite, leaving the satellite in its current orbit or moving the satellite to a graveyard orbit. Historically, due to budgetary constraints at the beginning of satellite missions, satellites were rarely designed to be de-orbited. One example of this practice is the satellite Vanguard 1. Launched in 1958, Vanguard 1, the 4th man-made satellite put in Geocentric orbit, was still in orbit as of August 2009."

-en.wikipedia.org...

It wasn't until 2002 that deorbiting or shifting into a "graveyard orbit" was required. That means that a fair number of decommissioned satellites between the 60's and 2002 are probably still in orbit.