December 5, 2008 on 9:14 pm | In Satellites | Comments Off

Calsky did forecast a very bright flare from Iridium 5 for tonight.  When talking to Jon Wood, he suggested to take the camera out, set it at 30 seconds and “let it rip”.  Well I did not set it at 30 seconds, because I wanted to control when to end the exposure, but positioned the camera well so it would pass throught the field of view.  As announced, Iridium 5 came thru and flared above my head with the left solar panel, but then came the nice flare from the right panel on the way down.  the brightness peaked at -6.3 and was brighter than Venus in the west.  Here my 55mm, 51 second image at f5.6 and ISO1600.

My house, where I took the image, was only 2100 feet from the center line of the flare. The red area along the wire, is a red tape moving in the wind. The tape is tied around the telephone wire crossing the road.

In addition, there were some thin clouds in the field of view with the moon shining right above them.

  20081205_IMG_2620small.JPG 

 

 

No Comments yet

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^ Powered by WordPress with jd-nebula-3c theme design by John Doe.