UT Dec 05, 2022: Imaging Satellites

Michael Richmond
Dec 20, 2022

On the night of Dec 04/05, 2022, I observed several artificial satellites of Earth as part of a remote-sensing project. The observations were made in the early evening, with the nearly full Moon lighting up the sky.

The main setup was:

• Meade 12-inch telescope
• no focal reducer, so working at f/10
• ASI 6200MM CMOS camera
• clear filter, exptime 1 or 3 seconds
• images binned 4x4
• no guiding
• focus values:
  • clear: 0.418 yielding FWHM 2.6 at T = 29/-2
  • clear: 0.415 yielding FWHM 5 (ugh) about 90 minutes later
• camera ran at T = -20 C

Notes from the night:

• skies were clear
• the nearly full Moon was very bright, and not so far from some targets
• the seeing turned poor in the second half of the run
• I accidentally interrupted the telescope while it was parking itself at the end of the night. Rather than give myself extra work at the start of the next night, I decided to go through the procedure right away: remove all cables, choose the polar alignment, claim proper alignment without making any adjustments, replace all the cables. Afterwards, I was able to sync on Jupiter pretty easily.
• Temperature when I left at 9:03 PM was 28 F = -2 C.

Targets tonight were GOES 16, DIRECTV-15, BEIDOU-12, and GPS BIIF-5.