This is now really interesting! The interloper in this image of NGC 3992 (M109) appears to have made 22 rotations in 15 seconds. That's ~88 rpm. Wicked fast. But - to have only covered about 9 arc-min in the sky in 15 seconds puts it in a very high orbit, comparable to satellites that are ~25,000 km above Earth. But this is _not_ an object in geosynchronous orbit, which is much higher. This _is_ approximately the median orbital altitude of a GPS satellite. But do they rotate that fast? Interesting stuff. Seth -----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Wiggins Patrick Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 11:28 PM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] What were the chances? It was a 15 second exposure. FOV is about 18x26 arc seconds. On 06 Jan 2014, at 08:36, Seth Jarvis <SJarvis@slco.org> wrote:
Patrick - that's a fascinating image. What was the exposure time? Can you estimate the width of the field of view? It'd be interesting to try to estimate the speed and rate of rotation of the interloper.
Thanks,
Seth
-----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Wiggins Patrick Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 4:58 AM To: Astronomy Utah Subject: [Utah-astronomy] What were the chances?
This from tonight's supernova search:
http://users.wirelessbeehive.com/~paw/temp/NGC_3992ZAP.JPG
Right through the core...
patrick
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