Examining well-being of Elon Mask' Starlink satellites

The very fact that the epic scene of not two or three, not even a dozen, but dozens of satellites passing by could be seen from our northern latitudes was pretty exciting for us. We also got terrifically lucky with the weather — after a full week of non-stop rain, the sky cleared for exactly an hour, giving us a chance to witness it. So, we armed ourselves with good old ZEISS lens and NEVA400 camera…

…and took a trip uptown. St. Petersburg was in the middle of its famous «white nights» phase at the moments, which could hamper our efforts.

But when the satellites have appeared on the horizon, we realized that objects this bright are impossible to go unnoticed with our equipment. We set exposure at 40 ms, but that turned out to be too high, 20 or even 10 ms could just as well be enough. Our old laptop’s hard drive started humming cheerfully, but it couldn’t handle the stream of gorgeous 4 MP video footage in its entirety, so there are some frames missing.

Enough stalling, here’s the video itself.
The full uncompressed version is available via this link:
«The original Starlink video»

Closer examination let us notice that not all satellites in the group behave the same way. First of all:

1. The main group consists of «merely» 45 satellites,
   
   
2. A few of them seem conjoined to our eyes — the distance between them is about 45-100 meters (so the resolution of the camera turns out to be 45 m along the orbit)
   
   
3. And there’s a whole bunch of satellites (at least three of them) that blend together into one extra bright spot (that could be assumed to be a separated stage, but the ballistic coefficient of something like that would be way different, making it get far ahead of the rest of the group, or lag behind it)
   
   
4. Some of the satellites do lag behind the rest of the group, at least six of them:
   
   

We could leave it at that, have we not gotten lucky enough to catch a glare from the satellites’ batteries. The satellites have their own orbital orientations, and when they are positioned in a certain way in respect to us and to the Sun, the camera is capable of capturing glares from them and their batteries both.

But not all of them…

The ones that lagged behind did not produce any glare, perhaps due to their disordered rotation and lack of coordination. The lack of coordination could also explain why they lose their speed upon entering the atmosphere at a slower pace compered to others.

Some satellites from the main group also failed to produce any glare.

The satellites that merged together were out of synch with the main group as well.

It appears that by now only a part of «passengers» feel totally fine — about 42-45 of them. The rest are suffering from orientation or close proximity issues (others are as close to them as 50-100 m).

Thanks to Elon Musk, a lot of astronomy afficionados can now observe, examine, and discuss the behavior of his satellites. =)

The list of equipment we’ve used:

1. NEVA400 camera, manufactured by NPK «Fotonika»
2. Carl Zeiss 200mm F/2.8 lens
   

Precise time and location:
58.403965, 31.097421; 01:16-1:22 26 of May 2019

The flight trajectory was determined on a basis of TLE presented below, with a possible error of about a couple degrees.

STARLINK
1 70002U 19999A 19144.10416667 .00000000 00000-0 00000-0 0 09
2 70002 053.0000 175.8692 0001467 047.2921 324.9821 15.42070599 01

We also wish to express gratitude towards Vera (and the entire staff of NPK «Fotonika») for developing the camera, and Alexey for processing the footage and joining us on our quest to capture this beauty.

Good luck and clear skies to you all.

P.S.: please credit this article if you’re using its materials.