I took this pic on Saturday night 2/7, roughly 5.45, in Johannesburg.
Two interesting things:

* The planets were dipping rather sharply. See how the brief exposure
caused the planets to streak.
* The pic has an interesting red and blue streaks. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Frank

Attached Images

Triplanetary_alignment_25_June_2005_5___copy.jpg (50.6 KB, 2 views)

The streaks are probably satellites. There are a large number along the celestial equator. There are also quite a large number that geostationary. Since your planets are moving, your camera must be stationary, thus the satellites must by moving quite rapidly. You seem to have captured a set of them orbiting together.

The planets appear to be moving simply from the earth's rotation at one hour of right ascension every hour. Since these are in the west, they are setting.

If you know the length of the exposure, you ratio the length of the longer arcs to the shorter planetary ones to determine how fast the satellites are moving across the sky. From that you can determine the period of the orbit if you account for the earth's rotation.

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The track of these "mystery objects" is quite different from that of the planets. This implies a very large inclination, and it would make sense to say these are a few satellites orbiting in some sort of polar orbit.

What convinces me is the middle "streak" is a series of dots. Very likely a rotating satellite with variable magnitude - the angle between the reflective surface (ie solar panels, antennae) and the sun changes rapidly, and so does the magnitude of the reflection.

cool photo regardless!

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