The Unwanted Blog

I used to use J-track to look up what was overhead, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore due to some Java security issue. Can anybody tell me what just passed overhead of here (northern Utah) at about 10:10 PM Mountain time, jsut a few minutes ago? It was on what appeared to be a more-or-less polar orbit, heading straight north, exhibiting some most remarkable “flashing.” I’ve been watching satellites out here for a decade now and have seen a number of different behaviors, but this one was very anomalous: invisibly dark most of the time, it would flare up to Venus-bright for just a split second (and I mean *very* quickly), then go dark again. A random couple of second later it would do it again, and again…

I’ve seen steady light from satellites (including what must have been the ISS heading easterly, just a minute or three after the other satellite), and I’ve seen  satellites that flare up for a second and down again, but this is the first one that “blinked” this quickly and this brightly.

Any heap appreciated.