Satellites

 awesomeness, photography
Mar 242010
 

Last night I did some landscape photography well after sundown, using moonlight and long exposures (result: meh). While doing so I looked up and noticed a satellite cruising overhead. I took a number of six-second exposures of it and another, brighter one I saw a bit later. Interestingly, in one of the shots you can actually make out *three* separate satellites, only one of which was visible to my naked eye. With the bright moonlight, long exposures of this part of the sky resulted in a lot of “glow,” rather than a nice black sky.

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 Posted by at 10:58 am

  2 Responses to “Satellites”

  1. Pat Flannery says:
    March 24, 2010 at 9:04 pm

    I never realized how much stuff is in orbit till I got a pair of 10×80 binoculars for star watching and found orbiting objects constantly going through the field of view as I was looking at star clusters and the Milky Way.
    You know, if you keep track of exposure time and the length of the lines they leave on the photo, you can figure out their orbital altitude, at least at that point in their orbit.
    Are the top two photos of the handle of The Big Dipper?
    The double star looks like Alcor and Mizar.

  2. admin says:
    March 25, 2010 at 2:59 am

    > Are the top two photos of the handle of The Big Dipper?

    Yup.

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