If you’re not burdened by city lights and surrounding buildings obstructing the sky, you can see satellites fly over at night. With a good camera you can catch a *lot* of satellites that you couldn’t see with the bare eye on the darkest of nights. But sometimes satellites are just incredibly bright. And sometimes they are tumbling, so that sunlight glints off of reflective solar panels and the like. Such “flares” can be very obvious.
Last night I set up my camera to take a succession of 30-second exposures, hoping to catch some Perseid meteors (spolier: I didn’t). I used the widest angle lens I have, with a fisheye attachment that’s really not very good (the stuff near the edge isn’t just distorted, it’s badly out of focus). One thing I did catch was a satellite that repeatedly flared, and quite brightly.
Note how brown the sky is. That’s one of the exciting features of having massive wildfires directly upwind a hundred miles or so. At one point today I though my house was on fire the smoke was so bad.