[ATMoB-discuss] geostationary satellite observation

[noatak at aol.com]

I had this same experience observing M42 last winter. It was an initial suprise which puzzled me a bit but then it did occur to me that it had to be a geosynchronous satellite. Looked on-line and sure enough, like many topics, there was plenty of?info on it including groups that "look" for these satellites and figure out which one is which, etc. I don't know the exact number but there are quite a lot of?satellites up there in that orbit.

Mike Hill



-----Original Message-----
From: Bert Halstead <rhh at curl.com>
To: atmob-discuss at atmob.org
Sent: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 10:24 pm
Subject: [ATMoB-discuss] geostationary satellite observation


Sunday night while observing M11 from my parents' place on the south shore of Long Island I had an experience that I figure many of you must have had, but I haven't ever read any discussion of it, so I thought I'd post a brief report.?
?
While viewing M11 at 220x I saw a moving object, about 11th magnitude, enter the field. It had the slow, smooth motion that immediately made me think "satellite" but then I realized that if this was a garden-variety satellite, at 220x it would have zoomed through the field at warp speed. After puzzling over this for a moment, I thought, huh, maybe it's a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit. So I turned off my clock drive and, sure enough, the satellite became stationary in the field while all the stars started flowing by at the same rate in the opposite direction! It was cute enough that I watched it for several minutes before moving on.?
?
Since my understanding is that geostationary satellites all travel in nearly the same orbit, I guess that if you observe M11 (or any other object at the same declination) from that latitude it won't be that uncommon to see a geostationary satellite drift across. I wonder how numerous those satellites are over our part of the world. I found a couple of informative Web pages at?
?
http://satobs.org/geosats.html?
http://www.planet4589.org/space/book/LOGS/logindex/geo.html?
?
but I still didn't get an exact answer to the question. However, it looks like there probably are dozens of them, although magnitude 11 may be brighter than average for them.?
?
-Bert?
?
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