Most people are surprised how often little Earth is bombarded by dust and rock. Despite my attempts to encourage people to look upward rather than watch the sludge on TV, people might know Earth is not the centre of the universe, but they still go about their lives like it's flat. Are they afraid of coming to terms with their insignificance when faced with 13 billion light years of nothing in all directions?
When I first hung out the window last week, I thought I wouldn't see a thing. When I caught the streak of orange light out of the corner of my eye, I actually felt scared. A fucking piece of rock just hit the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds! Just how often does this happen? Where did that piece of rock originate from? Can I even comprehend the distances and speeds involved? It's very humbling to see a meteor fly over what I see out my window every day. The usual and the extraordinary juxtaposed - it's jarring. That chance sighting of a bright meteor over an average post-industrial town, convinced me to keep my head out the window.
Keeping in mind that my medium-priced digital camera only has a crappy 3-second exposure setting, my attempts to photograph the various sights of the skies were less than successful. There's a bunch of dead-pixels on the sensor which result in clear white dots standing out on dark pictures. The sky is dark, and the less noticeable dead-pixels have been mistaken for pictures of stars and planets whilst I've attempted to photograph said objects. In much the same way as Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, I sat in fullscreen mode and flicked quickly between pictures, looking for a difference. Also keep in mind that I have no tripod for the camera - I'm holding as still as I can, in roughly the direction of the objects. What I did see very often were satellites. Low Earth Orbit communications satellites in polar orbits. Particularly the Iridium satellites.
 |
| Three instances of satellites photographed [badly, compared to this] by moi (all times UTC) |
You can see a dozen faint lights crossing overhead in about an hour, more so at this latitude when the Sun isn't far below the horizon. A number of times, the flare centre was only 20 or so kilometers away, and movement could immediately be picked out among the static stars. In one case, the flare centre was only 7KM away - a magnitude -6 light racing in an arc across the sky (that is, we perceive the sky as a flattened dome). I took to building a series of pillows to lie on, so that I could look up without having to twist my neck, rather than go outside and leave Heavens Above's Iridium flare predictor. I saw two more meteors whilst lying on my back, but the final object grabbed my attention whilst trying to photograph Sirius.
Out of the corner of my eye, was an orange object tumbling. A meteorite. I tried to photograph it, but it was too fait to pick out - I never got a chance to look at it through the binoculars because of my huried attempts to reset the exposure mode on the camera. The fact that I saw a tumbling rock confirms my belief that I'd already seen two meteorites - the first roughly 4 years ago in daylight, when I saw an orange flame tumbling through the air. The second was December 14th 2004 when I saw a light falling from the sky at about 1900 - at the time I dismissed it as a dud firework. Each time the rock looks not too-far away, however it's impossible to tell by sight, when the very same sense tells you a rising full moon is bigger than a full moon at zenith.
Hopefully the heavens got a larger audience than "Big Brother" (oh how the masses love our new Orwellian future™). Alas, the clouds are regrouping after a week of clear skies. I can only hope for some thunder storms.
[734]
No comments:
Post a Comment