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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2025 Apr 10, 07:55 -0700
Last night there was a planned launch of the first batch of Amazon's "Kuiper" satellite constellation, a direct competitor to SpaceX/Musk "Starlink". The launch, on a ULA Atlas rocket, was scrubbed due to weather just offshore. I had video and commentary (at minimum volume) running on a separate monitor while I was working, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something familiar: a bright slightly oblate circle with several small "stars" nearby! They were killing time during the long delay by pointing one of the launch-tracking scopes at something more interesting.
Here's the challenge: what time is? What is the UT of this image. You could maybe do it by looking at the "L-" delay in the upper right corner of the images and by looking up the planned launch window (that's a little bit of cheating). You could also do it by locating the stored youtube video and backtracking to the instant when this image was on-screen (that's a huge bit of cheating). Without cheating, can you estimate the UT from the astronomy on the left-hand side in the image? Let's say +/-15 minutes as close enough. Is it possible to do better? Maybe...
After the first view of this celestial body, they spent a few minutes lowering the "exposure" for a different view. These two images are displaying the same scene, the same celestial body, but with different "lighting".
Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island, North America