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Camelopadalid meteor?

The shape, brightness and direction are promising, but the streak continues dimly in the images before and after this one, so no, it's not a meteor but a satellite, and the bright flash is its solar panels catching the light of the sun just right to flash them at us briefly, like an "Iridium flare".

I still have two more sequences of time-lapse footage to go through, and this one will be easier to examine as video, so I'll probably find some meteors somewhere in the 1500+ images.  When I'm done the video footage will look something like this:
Perseid Meteor Shower – "While The Sun Was Sleeping" by Life Audience
#Camelopardalids   #meteorshower   #astronomy   #astrophotography  

Camelopadalid meteor?

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15 thoughts on “Camelopadalid meteor?”

  1. We crapped out around 9 – I'd been up since 3:30am and we have events today we wanted to actually be awake and functioning for, so sleep had priority.

    +Jeff Sullivan – how was our planet's first go 'round with the Camelopardalids?

    Good luck with finding shooting stars in the frames!

  2. I realize I didn't "technically" stay up through the "peak" at 3am… but having seen zero by 2:45am I realized this was not going to be producing the 2-3 per minute that most people were betting on.  After talking to other club members, I did discover that some of our observers at darker and better skies saw perhaps 8 meteors all night.

  3. Hehe, I had great success last night capturing iridium flares. It's a pity no one cares about them, because they are quite pretty when you don't know better. 🙂

  4. If I captured any Camelopardalid meteors +Tim Campbell I'll only find them after considerable processing and poring over images and video, and that's with 3 cameras going 4-5 hours each, pointing in 3 different directions with 14-16mm lenses to cover most of the sky.  I wasn't going to miss it, but it seems that there wasn't much to miss.  cc: +Richard Beebe +Rajamanickam Antonimuthu +David Foster 
    As +Derek Kind mentioned, there were plenty of satellites including a few with "Iridium flare" flashes, which cause a brief bit of excitement until you zoom in and see that they're not meteors.  
    There will probably be a lot of "meteor" photos today of objects a little too bright, a little too symetrical (such as an elongated diamond shape), lacking the red to green burn colors of most meteors, starting and ending abruptly instead of tapering at the ends, and/or are a little too persistent, spanning multiple consecutive shots in a sequence, all possible indications of the much more common satellites in the sky last night.

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