UT Dec 10, 2022: Imaging Satellites

Michael Richmond
Dec 22, 2022

On the night of Dec 09/10, 2022, I observed several artificial satellites of Earth as part of a remote-sensing project. For the first time, I took satellite images during the MORNING sky, starting around 3:40 AM and continuing to 6:12 AM. It was again cold (T = 19/-8 at the end), but I was better dressed this time.

The main setup was:

• Meade 12-inch telescope
• no focal reducer, so working at f/10
• ASI 6200MM CMOS camera
• clear filter, exptime 1,2, or 3 seconds
• images binned 4x4
• no guiding
• focus values:
  • clear: 0.430 yielding FWHM 2.4 at T = 28/-2
  • clear: 0.407 yielding FWHM 2.5 at T = 21/-6
• camera ran at T = -20 C

Notes from the night:

• skies were clear
• bright gibbous Moon in the South; it was particularly close to the Beidou images
• the hand-paddle's RA/Dec display was off in RA by about 1h 14m, even after I had just synced on a star. No troubles pointing to objects, either. I don't recall seeing this sort of error in the past.

Targets tonight were GOES 16, DIRECTV-15, and BEIDOU-12(C11).