odd satellite

Hi,

At 17:55 (give or take a minute) tonight from Dalkey I noticed a bright (about magnitude 0.5) point of light appear near Almach (Looking East about 45 degrees up) which just lasted for a tenth or so of a second. A blink just long enough to catch my eye.

I kept watching and about 15 seconds later it appeared again, just a brief on-off, but towards the south. This continued several more times as the object moved 'under' Andromeda, down through Pisces before I lost it behind a building. It looked like it would have dropped over the horizon to the SSW. Slow enough to give me the time to get my phone out and get the time of 15 seconds between flashes and roughly measure the distance of about 5 degrees between flashes. The light also appeared to be white and not have any obvious colour. I could not see it when it was 'off' but it was only 6pm and my eyes weren't dark adapted, though I could see other faint constant brightness satellites. There were also a couple of planes in the sky and it didn't look like them It's brightness did appear to diminish as it approached the horizon.

I've seen tumbling satellites and iridium flares before, but not one like this where the burst of light was so short and had no noticeable build up or fading down.

I haven't managed to find any satellite in theskyx that matches it; though I rarely can identify satellites that way so that's not a great surprise.

Has anyone else observed a satellite like that? Or have suggestions about how I could go about identifying what it was?

Hi Albert,

If we are on the same hymn sheet I caught these on the meteor camera last night (From Dublin pointing NNE), I will try upload the video to see if its what you saw. I had a look (Heavensat) and it 'appears' to be Tandem-X and Terrasar-X, you will find their TLE's in the Rescource.txt file at NORAD. All 4 hits were just flashes, not your standard Iridium flare.

Graham.

Links to the videos, albeit compressed and noisy but you can get the jist!

flic.kr/p/qb398i
flic.kr/p/qba5WW
flic.kr/p/pTNcFF
flic.kr/p/qba34G

Graham

Thanks Graham!

Those clips certainly seem to match pretty closely what I saw. Though I think perhaps it was a different satellite as those seem to be going in the opposite direction according to heavens above.

'Heavensat' is quite an impressive tool, thanks for the pointer to it! From that Meteor-2 looks a possible candidate, a Soviet satellite launched in 1984. From what little I can glean about that online ( www.lib.cas.cz/space.40/1984/072A.HTM thank god for google translate!) it seems to be a weather satellite, cylindrical in shape and 5m in length and 1.4m in diameter. It also has a solar array of 10m span. If there was some spinning motion those 10m arrays would certainly be able to cause a brief spike in brightness.