Manuel Castillo, from ESAC SMOS Ops, gives us again a nice shot of SMOS, but this time directly on the captured video behind the telescope. We can see at the end of the video a faint dart passing just under the main star, from left to right, and it’s SMOS !!!
So follow his recommendation if you want to see SMOS for true: takes yours binocular. And I will add, do find a good reference orbit and a main star close to this orbit (look how in the blog here) and stick to that star during the pass.
Here is his message to us:
Dear colleagues,
In the link below, find a SMOS track video captured on 2010-11-28 from Majadahonda-Spain with a SONY DCR PC-120 videocamera in Near Infrared.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pzpIF6-OBI[/youtube]
For a better show, it is recommended to use pop out and 480p resolution.
This track had the most desirable SMOS relative geometry to show the maximum brightness: eastern pass at near distance (800 km) and being the illuminated side of the solar panels the major contribution to the brightness. It confirms that the SMOS apparent magnitude is very faint.SMOS is not clearly detectable in the original video and it has been necessary to stretch the histogram in order to make it visible. The shown brightness variability is produced both by the youtube video compression and the original video interlacing.
A similar track (to be reported…) captured on 2010-12-03 allow to estimate the apparent magnitude around 6, near to the limit of naked eye detection. It means that high aperture binoculars or some other optical devices are mandatory for a good SMOS observation.
Best regards,
Manuel CastilloSMOS Ops Team