Mystery Object and Trail
At Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan - any ideas?
Comments

From: Dubliner73
Tue Jan 10 05:24:58 -0800 2006
quite interesting. the "trail" goes on for ~70 miles until
vanishing...

From: th7700
Tue Jan 10 06:53:52 -0800 2006
Looks like some sort of digital artifact. There is another one just like it to the east-southeast.

From: TexasAndroid
Tue Jan 10 10:12:07 -0800 2006
Over at GoogleGlobetrotting, we have 8-9 examples of this stuff in the Satellite Problems section, including this one.

Over at GoogleSightseeing, a good while back, someone posted the following:
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they are all roughly the same angle because they are perpendicular to the orbit of the Landsat satellite, which have an inclination of around 98 degrees. Landsat has a mirror that sweeps from side to side to image the ground under the orbit. The data from one or more of these swaths was obviously corrupted in these images, perhaps the swath wasn’t received properly at the ground station.
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Best explanation I've seen to date for the various "Packing Tapes".

From: faadmaja
Thu Jan 12 13:38:49 -0800 2006
This looks very much like light reflected off the solar panels of a lower-altitude satellite. Since its body reflects relatively little light, it reads as black. I don't know how long or frequent the composite exposures are, but the trail is most likely an artifact of the foreground satellite's own orbital motion. Imagine a craft with a similar design to this:

[img]http://www.glonass-center.ru/satellite.jpg[/img]
 



 


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