Four Station-Kept Satellites

Geostationary satellites are kept within a “station keeping box”, an imaginary box in the sky to keep all the satellites organized and out of each others way. At SiriusXM we recently launched our newest satellite, SXM-9, and it finally arrived at its final orbital location of 85.15W.

The arrival of SXM-9 is special because this means we now have four satellites co-located in the same station keeping box, a very rare event. I ended up with a fully clear night not long after the spacecraft arrived on station, so I tried to photograph the full dance of their orbital motion.

I used my 10” dobsonian telescope, a 2X focal reducer, and my ZWO AS290MC camera. I set the camera to take 5 second exposures and set the gain to get a good histogram. Some color adjustments were made to the images, time stamps were added, and they were converted directly into a video.

Thankfully there wasn’t much wind, so the video is quite stable. The satellites drift out of view after a few hours, I’m not sure if that’s orbital motion or my telescope sagging in elevation.

What wasn’t as fun was that it was 18 degrees fahrenheit outside while I was setting up. A metal telescope gets COLD, but thankfully I still have all ten fingers.

Go SXM-9!