Any clues to this?

I agree with Dave G on that, I dont think these are artificial satellites unless they are way out in very high earth orbit, much more probible is that they are asteroids.
They look very faint, any guesses as to the magnitudes?

One thing I do not understand is that you mention that its 6 stacked expopsures, there seems to be 6 dots in the brightest trail, and only 5 below it, so one dot is missing ???
I can make out that there might be 3 objects here, a fainter stream of dots is to the lower left.

I'm also confused by the times you mention, is each of the 9 frame 60 seconds each, or do they total 60 seconds?? what are the time gaps between each frame?

This is a remarkable image Dave. :shock:

Yes I can see three distinct objects too.

I've cropped and enlarged your image and circled where I see the three.

I figured that with the movement being over a period of 881 seconds that the object(s) are moving too slowly to be satellites.

I've just posted as high a resolution image as I could to my own website (to avoid the bandwidth here). Take a look at:

www.astroshack.net/tempmain.php

Its a big file - just over 200K

Dave G - I emailed the original FTS file to those addresses - thanks.

The other thing that got me too was that this locations is way off the ecliptic. I know there are asteroids that are highly inclined but would this location be pretty unusual to find asteroids?

Anyway, thanks for the responses folks. You never know...

Cheers

Dave McD

Dave L - not sure of the magnitudes to be honest but I'm sure a bit of detective work on the image would give a close value.

I checekd back through my DSI folder and there are 14 images in total. But the software has rejected 5 of them for 'poor' quality. Luckily, I had the software set to save all images regradless of their quality. The image posted to IFAS and on my website are the best 9 as determined by the software. Each image is a 60 second unguided exposure with probably a second or two between each one whilst the imager downloads the data before commencing the next image. The final image is 9 stacked images of 60 seconds each. With some more processing I might be able to put the other 5 rejected images in.

I have to say (both Dave's) that I didn't notice the third object. It may just be noise but if you squint, it may well be a third object!

Curiouser and curiouser....

Cheers for the input - I'll try and process these over the next day or two...

Dave McD

Folks - I just took a look at all 14 images and blinked them. Well, gobsmacked isn't the word. There are definately two objects moving in parallel, slower than any man-made satellites I've ever seen.

The two objects are actually quite bright in the individual images and are more easily identifiable than in the composite (stacked) image.

As far as magnitudes go, I really don't know for sure. The 3 brighter stars to the right center of the image are about mag 14 as far as I can tell. But I've never imaged anything dimmer than about mag 16/16.5 with this setup.

The image below is a (poorly) aligned composite of the first image taken at 23:43 local time and the second image taken at 23:56. Each image was a 60 second exposure. So the objects seem to have travelled about 1 minute distance (in the image) in about 13 or 14 minutes.

This is a real puzzler for me....

Folks - I just went through the images again and I now have a strong suspicion these are artefacts, probably in the CCD. The two points show up in the same location in each image - the DSI software confused me because it stacks 'on the fly' so the artefacts trail. But when you blink them, they are in exactly the same spot in each image. I checked my dark frames but I don’t see any hotspots. I also checked some other images I took tonight but they're hardly comparable anyhow.

I think I'll put this one down to experience... :oops:

Best excitement I've had in ages since the Toffees got into Europe though

Dave McD