# Tag Info

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People have been thinking about and a articles have been coming out on this topic. This article states that as many as hundreds of satellites may be visible at once during twilight at certain latitudes. The IAU has released this statement, which is based in part on this article. The exact way Starlink will affect observational astronomy is not yet known, ...

4

Orbits are all ellipses, so when you throw a baseball you change the orbit of the base ball from your circular ellipse to another ellipse. If you throw it prograde (in the velocity direction), then you baseball will have an elliptical orbit. It will be closest to the Earth at the point at which you threw it, and furthest from the Earth (and higher than the ...

3

You may have seen some artificial satellites passing into the Earth's shadow. If so, Heavens-Above could help you identify them. The reddish color just before disappearance would be due to the atmosphere scattering shorter wavelengths of sunlight.

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Does not sound astronomical. But in order to test for astronomical phenomenon you need to state date time (time zone) and location, and direction (roughly). Of course if it was cloudy. The free software Stellarium (stars planets, satellites + ...), in conjunction with Heavens Above (up to date satellite info) can answer most of these types of questions.

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You could convert the orbital elements into x,y,z and $\dot{x}, \dot{y}, \dot{z}$ and then calculate a whole orbit. A source for converting orbital elements into cartesian coordinates is here.

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In January SpaceX launched into space a string of 60 satellites into space. These are satellites for internet communications. Astronomers say the proliferation of the bright metallic satellites could seriously degrade the night view, interfering with both optical and radio astronom$y^1$ 1.https://www.sciencealert.com/spacex-just-launched-a-third-batch-of-...

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Table 2 from Drlica-Wagner et al., 2020 contains a list of 61 confirmed and candidate Milky Way satellites. Two of these are unconfirmed, and two are probable star clusters. 39 are confirmed satellite galaxies with known kinematics and 18 are probable satellite galaxies. These are all in a radius of about 300 kpc from the Sun. Deeper surveys in the coming ...

1

It sounds like a tumbling satellite and by your description of the different locations in the sky during the second pass, it sounds like you saw the same one over the course of two orbits. Maybe not, though, because it'd (most likely) be 90 mins from one orbit to the next and conditions would have to be just right for the geometry of the Earth/Sun/Satellite ...

1

Altitude is measured in degrees above the horizon, from 0° on the horizon to 90° directly overhead. Your fist appears about 10° wide at arm's length away from your eye. Azimuth is measured along the horizon, usually with north 0°, east 90°, south 180° west 270°, and other directions (e.g. NNE, ENE) interpolated as in the compass ...

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Yes they can. It depends on how the satellites are deployed from the launch vehicle.

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