It's Geostationary Satellite Eclipse Season!

For about a month around each equinox geostationary satellites will fall into the shadow of the Earth for about an hour a night, often called ‘eclipse season’. Each time I try to photograph it, and this spring I was hoping to use my nicer planetary camera.

An issue with the planetary camera is that it has a very high zoom level, so I bought a focal reducer to zoom back out slightly. I had some issues mating the lens to my camera, but it’s nothing some very official duct tape couldn’t handle. With my ZWO ASI290MC camera and 0.5x focal reducer I was able to get XM-3 and XM-5 in the frame at the same time. I was hoping AMC-16 would fit too, but no such luck.

I set my telescope near my back door so my laptop could sit inside the house, and away from any dew that could damage it. I used 5 second exposures at gain 300 and let the laptop run. I was expecting to use about 40GB of data overnight, but sadly I was struck down by a Windows update at 11:30pm and my computer was rebooted before the eclipse.

Even though I missed the eclipse I still got some interesting shots of the satellites!

This is a one hour time lapse (I captured 3 hours of images, but you don’t need to sit through all that). Early on we were photo-bombed by Cosmos-1743 which I thought was interesting.

What caught my eye is that the satellites are visibly moving in relation to one another. By stacking all the images on top of one another we see tons of star trails, but also the paths the satellites were taking.

This image is a bit busy, but I love it. You can see the satellites path, and one even did a hard 90 degrees. I’m not sure if that was a station keeping maneuver or if it was simply the normal drift direction viewed from my vantage point. Sadly there’s no visible puff when the satellites maneuver, but it’s still col. I also love seeing how colorful all the satellites are when I take these shots.

I think the weather might cooperate for a second attempt at the satellite eclipse tonight, so I’ve left my telescope set up and hopefully it stays pointed correctly all day. Fingers crossed!