Few nights ago I started a serious exercising on the Mesu mk2 mount.
It’s not all about deep space, sometimes when you want to follow rocks on the space you need to use your mount in a different way.
Here on this link you could find my collection of rocks reported to the MPC.
If you pretend to follow artificial satellites from the earth surface-.. it’s a different history. The relative speed of this targets above our sky is higher and it’s necessary to do a camera expo some seconds. That’s means you need to keep the movement following the satellite all this time.
After to obtain the visible passes and their orbits of some artificial satellites (because they are illuminated by our sun at night) I started these collection as mount exercise.
Each satellite has a TLE orbit describing with two text lines the relative state base on his velocity and position.
As example, the chinese satellite BEIDOU 3M15 has this TLE:
1 43647U 18078A 20046.14555854 -.00000079 00000-0 10000-3 0 9998 2 43647 55.1789 19.8582 0007789 329.5852 289.6563 1.86232910 9076
This satellite is one of the caughted, it has an orbit on a order of 21,556.7 km above the earth and it was launch on October of 2018. The amount of time to take one revolution to the earth is 773.2 minutes, it’s fast….
It’s used for the chinese Beidou navigation system.
Here the capture of the BEIDOU 3M15
and here a compilation of some of this satellites captures
Don’t forget that at this time (2020 Feb) more that 2000 satellites are crossing above your head just at this moment…..
And of course, all these efforts are… for capture the International Space Station at some point….