Curved sat trail (or what is it?) , never seen that before on my images

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Maybe a silly question but is the curved sat trail in image below actually a satellite or something else ?

Steve

[tooth_dr]

Could it be a trail left by a bright star as the scope was slewing? 

[Stuart1971]

28 minutes ago, teoria_del_big_bang said:

Maybe a silly question but is the curved sat trail in image below actually a satellite or something else ?

Steve

Interesting….🤔🤔

[SamAndrew]

Aliens!

There's no way a satalite could perform that tight a change of direction.

[ONIKKINEN]

Bird or insect maybe?

Or perhaps some asymmetric piece of space junk/space rock that "skips" off the atmosphere and so changes direction.

I really dont think its a satellite as its doing an inclination change burn as this kind of change would need ~10km/s delta v to make in low earth orbit. If it was in higher orbit, we would see only a part of this trail as it would travel much slower. 10km/s is not really something that any satellite or other spacecraft for that matter is going to have available to it. Its even worse when you think about the time this exposure spans, which is probably just a few minutes. So a very short burn and 10km/s delta v = not happening. Very strange.

[vlaiv]

My guess is that it is meteor.

It can't be quite seen as image is significantly reduced, but to my eye - there are two parts to that trajectory - "bottom" part which is fainter and suggests faster motion and "upper" part that is thicker and somewhat wobbly - which suggests either slower speed and / or change in brightness - in either case - it is indicative of atmosphere interaction (which both slows down and increases temperature of falling object).

Fact that it is highly curved - suggests very steep angle on actual trajectory, it is actually thing of perspective - something like this:

From this angle - arch looks very curved

Same bridge "head on":

arch curve is much straighter.

[teoria_del_big_bang]

10 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Could it be a trail left by a bright star as the scope was slewing? 

The scope was tracking and guiding, and was not the first image in the sequence so it did not slew there then start taking images it was in the middle of several images.

Steve

Edited March 23, 2022 by teoria_del_big_bang

[teoria_del_big_bang]

9 hours ago, SamAndrew said:

Aliens!

There's no way a satellite could perform that tight a change of direction.

I was thinking the same but no expert in this field (about the change of direction not necessarily the Aliens bit 🙂 )

Steve

[teoria_del_big_bang]

10 hours ago, Stuart1971 said:

Interesting….🤔🤔

Yes that's what struck me, so used to seeing multiple sat trails these days on single subs I do not usually take any notice, or even airplanes which are obvious what they are, but never saw anything like that before.
Probably @vlaiv's explanation may explain it ?

Steve

[Shibby]

What date was the image captured? There's something suspect about the way the initial trajectory lines up with the other trails. I wonder if you've captured a starlink launch, the last of which was on the 19th March. I'm not sure what happens to the second stage after deployment though, whether it has another burn or not.

[tomato]

Starlink satellite being selectively affected by the gravitational pull of M81?😉 

Seriously though,  it's an intriguing image.

[Bukko]

I can only think of a catastrophic failure of the satellite rocket sending it wildly off course. I am pretty certain it is one of the satellite cluster as the trajectory starts off parallel.

I hope no-one minds, especially Steve, who posted it, but I emailed SpaceX to ask them if they could help explain what happened.

Gordon.

[teoria_del_big_bang]

9 minutes ago, Bukko said:

I can only think of a catastrophic failure of the satellite rocket sending it wildly off course. I am pretty certain it is one of the satellite cluster as the trajectory starts off parallel.

I hope no-one minds, especially Steve, who posted it, but I emailed SpaceX to ask them if they could help explain what happened.

Gordon.

I have no issues with that 🙂 

Steve