Tuesday 14 December 2010

A satellite in the "fish mouth" of Orion's nebula, and nine geosats in one image

Sunday evening, I shot a number of images of the geostationary belt in Orion using the Carl Zeiss Jena 2.8/180 mm lens. This yielded amongst others a very pretty picture of the Milstar 6 r/b (03-013B), snapped when it was located spot on in the dark "fish mouth" area of M42, the Orion nebula:

click image to enlarge


The image below shows a full image shot, measuring 6.8 x 5 degrees. It shows as much as 9 geostationary satellites (3 classified and 6 commercial) in the same image. Numbered boxes refer to the detail images below the main image. Note how many of them (boxes 3 to 6) line up along declination -7.3 degrees, in a line from bottom left to upper right.

click on image to enlarge

No comments: