As anyone who’s looked at the sky just before dawn or right after dusk can confirm, for the last seventy years or so there have been all kinds of artificial satellites floating around in low-Earth orbit that are visible to the naked eye. Perhaps the most famous in the last few decades is the International Space Station, but there are all kinds of others up there from amateur radio satellites, the Starlink constellation, satellite TV, and, of course, various spy satellites from a few of the world’s governments. [Felix] seems to have found one and his images of it can be found here.
[Felix] has been taking pictures of the night sky for a while now, including many different satellites. While plenty of satellites publish their paths to enable use, spy satellites aren’t generally public record but are still able to be located nonetheless. He uses a large Dobsonian telescope to resolve the images of several different satellites speculated to be spy satellites, with at least one hosting a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. His images are good enough to deduce the size and shape of the antennas used, as well as the size of the solar panels on board.
As far as being concerned about the ramifications of imaging top-secret technology, [Felix] is not too concerned. He states that it’s likely that most rival governments would be able to observe these satellites with much more powerful telescopes that he has, so nothing he has published so far is likely to be a surprise to anyone. Besides, these aren’t exactly hidden away, either; they’re up in the sky for anyone to see. If you want to take a shot at that yourself you can get a Dobsonian-like telescope mostly from parts at Ikea, and use a bit of off-the-shelf electronics to point them at just the right position too.
cool
Looking at them looking at you looking ay them!
It’s eyeballs all the way down.
3 identical cartoon Spiderman figures standing in a triangular pattern each pointing at one another
If motion dither is applied to this the resolution can be better. A number of images can make up for the low res. I know they can do this.
Looks like there’s some series of photos in gif form as the satellite moves across the sky and the angle changes. Maybe you could run motion dither on the frames in the middle of those
“You didn’t see nothing!” – CIA (I assume.)
“spy satellites aren’t generally public record”
I believe with the many orbital tracking databases just about everything up there is public record, what the things are doing, what they look like, who owns each… might be secret, but the existence of “unknown satelllite at such and such an altitude, inclination, right ascension ascending node…” isn’t something that can really be hidden.
This. It would endanger ISS crew if it wasn’t in the database.
If it happens to be near the orbit of the ISS sure. Space is big though. I’m not saying an unknown, secret satellite wouldn’t endanger something else but there is plenty of room for orbits which will never intersect with the ISS specifically.
Actually the secret satellites sometimes change position, and they don’t announce they do, so only the orgs that use RADAR tracking of objects would notice, but they might not be allowed to share that info when their government doesn’t want them to (including the in US).
AI, enhance!
B^)
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