MIR Observation

 

 

With Mir about to crash back into the Pacific Ocean this image taken on 05/03/01 at 17:58:56UTC must be amongst the last ever taken of it. This image was a joint effort with Mike Tyrrell. Taking high resolution images of satellites is more difficult than planets because the telescope does not track completely smoothly. We  found that the satellite would not stay in the high power field for more than a few seconds so we had one person correcting the telescope's motion with a joystick facility offered by the SatTrack program and the second person using the camera remote control zoom adjustment. The technique was to zoom out as soon as the satellite left the high power field and then in again once it had been re-centred. 

Mir 17:58:56 UTC 05/03/01
Range  327 km ( closest approach 316km at 17:59:11 )
Altitude:  51°    Azimuth: 201° Height: 257km
Approximate image size 20 arcseconds (30 metres at Mir's distance )

Sun 
Altitude: -1.4° Azimuth: 262°

 
This is a photograph of a Revell 1:144 scale model of Mir in approximately the same orientation as the image above. 

    

Technical details:

Meade 10" f6.3 LX200 telescope mounted on equatorial wedge, 28mm eyepiece
JVC GRDVL308 digital video camera f=36mm at x10 zoom
Combined system F=2059mm  f=8.1
Sattracker V2.0.3b software running on a Pentium90,Windows 95 PC
PC time synchronization using Tardis 2000 software and a Garmin 45 GPS unit
Telescope manual time synchronization using an atomic clock radio receiver
Image is a composite of the 4 sharpest frames from the tape 
The image was processed with a maximum entropy deconvolution routine and contrast stretched
 

Links to related sites:-

Other MIR photographs from Earth
MIR Feb 2001 Dirk Ewers
MIR & shuttle 1995 Ron Dantowitz
1998 photographs of MIR from orbit
STS-91
Tardis 2000 time sync home page
Mike Mcants TLE keplarian elements page
Meade telescopes
Other useful satellite related pages
Visual Satellite Observers home page
 

 

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