11 replies to this topic

[BQ Octantis]

My capture of Witanen on the night of the 11th had a lot of satellite trails, so I figured it might be fun as an animation. It looks like there's a lot of debris in the same orbit—I count nine distinct pieces in a group to the right of the comet (click for full size):

 

Comet 46P/Wirtanen 2018-12-11, 61˚ elevation
Canon 200mm f/2.8L@f/2.8, Canon T3i (unmodified)
Orion SkyView Pro mount, Magnificent Mini Deluxe autoguider
51×30 sec@ISO800, 40×darks, 20×flats
Processed in Photoshop CS5 w/Astronomy Tools v1.6
Scaled to 29%, cropped to 912×684
Tropic of Capricorn, NT, Australia

 

Cheers,

BQ

Edited by BQ Octantis, 19 December 2018 - 06:10 AM.

[happylimpet]

Really cool, cheers!

[h2ologg]

Nice!  I believe those satellite trails are geosynchronous telecommunications satellites. Weren’t you shooting Wirtanen when it was close to the celestial equator?

Dan

[Traveler]

Very nice!

[kbev]

Nice!  I believe those satellite trails are geosynchronous telecommunications satellites. Weren’t you shooting Wirtanen when it was close to the celestial equator?

Dan

Based on the times in the animation and a location in the Northern Territories (Alice Springs in this case) this is what Stellarium shows:

 

The FOV is based on my 1100D with a 200mm lens, his might be a bit different but close enough to show the train of geosats running past the comet.  

[jgraham]

Neat stuff!

[h2ologg]

BQ,  what did you use to produce the video?  Love how it places the time stamp and maintains the image quality.

[Starman27]

Well done.

[moxican]

Man.... that is just one fantastic image. Work very well done 

[BQ Octantis]

Thanks to all for the likes and comments. Sure enough, I captured the geosynchronous belt. I combined the animation frames to highlight the orbits; I then superimposed a Stellarium capture from the center of the capture time to get my bearings. To my surprise (only because I didn't study Kevin's image above in more detail), there were five unexpected stars in the Stellarium overlay that turned out to be geosynchronous satellites right along the majority of the trails. Here's everything superimposed on the full sensor frame (I had cropped the animation to meet the file size limit):

 

 

Cheers,

BQ

Edited by BQ Octantis, 06 January 2019 - 04:09 PM.

[BQ Octantis]

BQ,  what did you use to produce the video?  Love how it places the time stamp and maintains the image quality.

Dan,

 

I used Photoshop CS5. The Animation function is quite powerful, but still very labor intensive. Each time stamp is a manually entered layer (which I pulled from each file's time stamp). The Save for Web and Devices function lets you export the animation to an animated GIF, and Photoshop's dither patterns produce excellent results.

 

Cheers,

BQ

Edited by BQ Octantis, 06 January 2019 - 07:15 AM.

[BQ Octantis]

Based on the times in the animation and a location in the Northern Territories (Alice Springs in this case) this is what Stellarium shows:

46p_geosats.png

 

The FOV is based on my 1100D with a 200mm lens, his might be a bit different but close enough to show the train of geosats running past the comet.  

Kevin, you nailed it!

 

Cheers,

BQ