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comment by b-612
b-612  ·  3350 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I saw a flare but it wasn't Iridium neither the ISS

The weather was crystal clear. I have quiet good skies here, and I would say I can see any satellite with a brightness below 5 without having to spend 2 hours getting used to darkness. At first I thought it was Sirius, but then it starting getting brighter and Sirius is never that bright, and Venus doesn't rise from that part of the sky. We are talking of a magnitude -7 for over a minute, like wait a minute, this thing is so bright and for so long that perhaps I have time to go pick my camera and take a picture. It was a satellite because when it starting dimming it was just a tiny magnitude 3 dot until I couldn't see it anymore and it seemed to be moving then. What surprised me the most was the length of the flare and that it seemed stationary. Second thing that surprised me was that I thought it was an iridium flare but when I went to look at it on heavens above there wasn't any object with that brightness. Could have been an airplane, no helicopters at night, since I'm relatively near Barcelona airport and there are several airways over my place, but I am 99% sure it wasn't an airplane.





user-inactivated  ·  3350 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well you definitely described a flare of something that looks like a satellite. I wonder if the new Galileo stuff flares like the Iridium, and if so are they in the databases yet? Iridium flares can get to -7.8 or so if you are dead center on the flare path; the brightest I usually see are about -5 or so, just about twice as bright as Venus.