36,000km

Geostationary Satellites

Two points of light, presumably geostationary satellites, watching the Earth from a distance of 36,000km. I say "presumably" because I merely knew that for my latitude, all geostationary satellites appear at -7.3 degrees declination. With this knowledge, I pointed my scope at this declination, and varied the right ascension, taking a new image every 10 minutes.

Because geostationary satellites stay at almost exactly the same place over the Earth all the time, they can be photographed by shutting off the telescope's motor, letting the stars pass through the field and then looking for dots that did not move, such as the two above.

The image above is approximately 10% of the original 35mm image. It was extremely contrast stretched in Adobe Photoshop 5.5.

Exposure Data

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