Venesat-1 Tumbling and Drifting

Recently Venezuela lost control of their satellite Venesat-1 while trying to move it to a graveyard orbit. It is slowly drifting to the east and will soon be out of visual range from my longitude. More details on the situation here.

I had a brief gap in the clouds tonight and was able to photograph it tumbling and drifting. The 19 minute time lapse is briefly interrupted by clouds, and then finally ended by clouds. I may try again tomorrow in clearer skies, but it will also be noticeably lower on the horizon.

This is the video with frames directly out of the camera with no editing:

Camera settings were ISO 6400 and 15 second exposures. The telescope was fixed in place, so any motion in the satellite is due to the eastward drift.

With some level adjustments to the frames in darktable we get the following video:

The bright stars near the end are actually part of the Orion nebula. At 9:57pm my time the Orion nebula almost went directly behind Venesat-1. Here is a screenshot from Stellarium.

By combining all the frames of the video into a single image we can see the background stars streak by, but also the tumbling and drifting of the satellite. I removed the cloud frames from this image.