Starlink satellites and other night sky pics

A clear night and prospects for a batch of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites to pass over around 10 pm BST. After the pass a few more shots to finish the evening.

A night out simply equipped with a Canon 600D DSLR and Samyang 8mm fish eye lens on a sturdy Manfrotto tripod. A Canon remote control is the only other thing needed. Shutter set to 30 seconds, ISO 800 and lens full open at f/3.5. Pretty much just took continuous frames.

There were several passes visible to the naked eye, but some were quite hard to capture. And as the sky is bright when combining the images the fainter trails disappear. This image is five frames combined (2.5 minutes) using Affinity Photo.

Having captured lots of images obviously need to run these together to create a star trails image. To do this on a Mac I installed a package called StarStaX. This is really easy to use and works well.

A few further ‘random’ shots taken before heading in. This picture shows another satellite (not a Starlink) over the dome, and I also noted on the image a small patch of stars. Checking on the star atlas this is known as the Coma Star Cluster or Melotte 111.

Finally here is a shot looking north. The sky is clearly a lot darker in this direction.