Yesterday (3-Feb-2019) I photoed an Iridium flare just five minutes after sunset in what was still daylight. However as you can see, I caught only half of the flare.
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| Iridium flare 3 /2/2019 |
Here are two photos that describe the flare. The first shows its path along the state of Israel and the second one show its path in the sky. The starts are there but can't be seen of course.
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Flare central line over Israel
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It is important to understand that in such case it is extremely important to be near he central line as possible. Even few kilometers east or west of it and the flare will not be visible. during the night one can be tens of kilometers away but not during the day.
I choose a spot on the central line and setup my camera using the smart phone compass, and about 20
seconds before the pass start to record a video.
The flare was very bright and very short, and the final result is seen in the photo at the beginning of the post.
The camera is much more sensitive than the human eye, and recorded some seconds of the flare but
unfortunately I didn't aim it to the correct spot.
So what went wrong? I wanted to use a larger focal length to capture a long and wide flare. using longer focal length require precision so it is better to use lower focal length. Also since the flare moves from top to bottom (or bottom to top), putting the camera vertically will give mush more space for errors. So more is less. More zoom, less space for errors, and I should use 50mm instead of 70mm.
To summarize here is an old video showing rare double daytime Iridium! At least I got that right!
And to finish the post, we will add a great sunset photo after the flare
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| sunset 3/2/2019 |