I photographed geostationary satellites in orbit 22,000 miles above
the earth using a camera and 135mm lens and ASA 400 film from Brazos
Bend State Park not far from Houston. Here are three such satellites
located in close proximity. This is a timed exposure and the stars are
drifting by as shown by the parallel lines. The three satellites
remain essentially fixed.
As a challenge I tried to capture more in one frame and succeeded in snagging 7. The objects are from left to right: Galaxy 3, SAS-3, Telstar 3A, SBS 2, Westar 4, SBS-1, and SBS-4. The date is October 4, 1985.
Some satellites at this high altitude will flash to naked eye brightness. As an example here is Telstar 401 which was recorded 11/26/00. It flashed up to +1 magnitude though some of its flashes were not quite naked eye brightness. Sometimes the big flash was preceded by another smaller one 5 seconds before hand. Here is the first faint flash.
The next image shows the much more distinct and brighter, 3rd magnitude flash which occurred 5 seconds later. If you compare the two images (which have been extracted from video tape) you can see that there is a star in the lower left corner of the first frame that does not appear in the other. Nothing mysterious here. This is a consequence of using SNAPPY to capture images from video. Sometimes it will capture all point sources on a frame, sometimes it will not.
