Surfing the Galaxy---Space Debris
An article published in The AlterNETive Searcher Issue #8
This article is copyright Hermograph Press 1999 and may not be reproduced in any media without the express written permission of the publisher. A single hard copy printing of this article is allowed per personal use.
I had just sat down in my new, perfect-for-stargazing chaise lounge, when the most unusual meteor came into view. It was orange, not white. It traveled across the sky not at great speed but unnaturally steadily, in a line straight as a ruler. Finally, the meteor broke apart but the pieces looked like little sparks, like those at the end of some firework displays, and they traveled in line behind the main piece.
This was no meteor but a piece of space debris, Some piece of a rocket or satellite re-entering the atmosphere. In more than three decades of observing, I’ve seen many satellites and meteors but never a dying manmade shooting star.
Meteors are around all the time, and nowadays you can hardly tell a satellite from a high flying plane. But if you know where and when to look, you can enjoy both the thrill of the hunt and the surprise of the unexpected.
Let’s start with the satellites. With thousands of them up there in various orbits, plus innumerable bits of castoff rockets, shieldings, bolts and whatnot, it’s a bit daunting to try to calculate what’s going to be visible tonight. To see a “space bird” one needs to be in darkness but the bird has to be in sunlight. Those conditions only exist for any location for just a few hours after sunset and before sunrise. In between, both of you are in the earth’s shadow. Many satellites can fulfill this condition at any given moment but most are also quite small and dim. If you limit yourself to the brightest ones, it’s a lot easier to manage.
This is what is done at www2.gsoc.dlr.de/scripts/satvis/, a German site (but in English) that tracks thousands of satellites. Step 1) Select your location by finding your town or the nearest large city to you in their list. Then Bookmark or HotLink this site into your Web browser’s list of favorite sites. The location name, latitude, longitude and timezone will be automatically recorded for future visits.
Step 2) Select the link for “All satellites brighter than magnitude 4.5.” Magnitudes are astronomers’ measures for brightness. You’ve heard said of a Hollywood actress “she’s a star of the first magnitude?” That means she’s the brightest star on the scene. Magnitude 6 is the faintest most people can see under dark skies. In light polluted skies, you’ll be lucky to see magnitude 3 or 4. The link generates a list of visible space birds. Most are in the 3rd or 4th magnitude range but sometimes bright Mir, the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope or some other less well known satellites cross into view. The listings show height and direction and times for the satellites’ rising into view, peak (the easiest time to spot it) and disappearance into the earth’s shadow. You can even get a star map with the path plotted on it for reference!
Also fun is looking for Iridium satellites. These are satellites for some cell phone companies. They orbit the earth in a fixed orientation, their antennae and solar cells rigidly placed, not rotating or wobbling. So at key moments, if you are in the right direction, a brilliant sun reflection will flash suddenly in the sky, moving north or south, then vanishing seconds later. They look like slow moving but brilliant meteors.
Speaking of meteors, you can never tell when one will appear, specifically. But there are times when a sighting is more probable than others. The best time is the hour before dawn, the worst is the hour after sunset. And there are dates that are better than most. These are when the earth plows through streams of meteoric debris. Then we have a meteor shower, when the counts of meteors during any hour of the night are higher than normal and the meteors all seem to radiate from a particular point on the sky.
A great place to check out when a shower will occur is Gary Kronk’s Comet and Meteor Pages, at medicine.wustl.edu/~kronkg/meteor.html. Here you’ll find what showers will occur when, the location the meteors seem to come from, how many there will be and good advice on how to observe them.
Centered on August 11 and 12, the Perseids shower us with around 60 meteors per hour (sometimes more!), streaming out of the constellation of Perseus. These are the good ol’ reliables, swift, bright, and ofte n leaving a smoky trail behind them. And the nights are warm....
In November we get one more shot at a meteor storm when the Leonids cross our path. The Leonids are visible every year as a minor shower, maybe 10 per hour, but every 33 years we get a rush of 1000s per hour. Last year it fooled astronomers, the storm arriving 16 hours before its predicted time. This year, North America may be fortunate enough to see this happen one last time. Jupiter is pulling the meteoroids’ orbits a bit and we’ll be missing that great storm for the next few hundred years.
By then, maybe the Internet will truly be universal….