Time Lapse of SiriusXM Satellites

I'm fascinated with satellites, I love working on them but I also love trying to photograph them. This site is full of my attempts to get the space station, but the other night I thought I'd give some geostationary satellites another try.

I was aiming for 3 colocated Intelsat satellites but was having a hard time finding them. Star hopping is very difficult in the light polluted NJ skies, and I had more success finding the SiriusXM satellites XM-3 and XM-5 which I've previously photographed. After the difficulties finding the satellites I finally dialed in some camera settings that looked good and set the camera to automatically take pictures. Sadly I don't own any fancy equipment to do this, I use the more character-building method of a rubber band and some duct tape.

After about an hour the camera battery finally died and I was able to start the long process of processing all those pictures.

First, the result:

I'm very happy with this image. The satellites are bright and crisp (especially for being +10 magnitude), and the stars are amazingly colorful.

Each image was a 13 second exposure at ISO 6400. Even with those settings the background noise was frustratingly high, probably thanks to the nearly full moon. It took a lot of fiddling in DarkTable to get the image to a point where I was happy with it. A lot of tweaking saturation, exposure, and contrast using parametric masks to get it right.

It was a tough balancing act to bring out the stars without making the background noise look ridiculous, but I think this is as good as it will be with my level of light pollution.

Next I put all the images together in windows movie maker to create an animation of the hour long time lapse.

I noticed early in the video that a few frames were much brighter and noisier than the rest. Upon closer inspection it looked like a lot of dim stars like a cluster. I checked stellarium and what do you know, right as I was taking pictures the wild duck cluster (M11) went directly behind the satellites. Obviously the cluster isn't clear because of the 13 second shutter speed, but it's a really amazing happenstance.