Speaker
Description
The very first new Hungarian satellite tracking optical device after closing all optical satellite observations about 35 years ago – is the PAN-8 sensor at Baja, developed and installed by Sybilla Technologies Spólka z.o.o. (Bydgoszcz, Poland). During the EON project (2021-2025) funded by ESA, optical “white light” observations were performed in the course of 2024-2025, around on 219 nights (some 1.665 hours of net observing time) producing nearly 450.000 data files corresponding to more than 1 million individual unfiltered exposures. In this paper the authors present and compare some methods to determine the rotational period of space objects using unfiltered photometry, applied by us. These methods are tested using real datasets downloaded from free database of transit observations. Then we applied our method to some light curves measured by PAN-8 at Baja Observatory during the night of June 24, 2025. The studied objects were Norad ID: 25074 (SL-12 rocket stage), Norad ID: 16199 (COSMOS-1700) and Norad ID: 15873 (INTELSTAT 511). We could determine the synodical periods of each ones.
The work is based on the Postgraduate Specialisation thesis of the first author, completed as part of the Hungarian UNISPACE course, hosted by Eötvös Loránd University in cooperation with University of Szeged.