2019-05-26

[public] 7.73K views, 129 likes, dislikes audio only

AlphaPhoenix

Footage of the just-launched Starlink constellation from Santa Barbara. You may want to play it in 4k resolution even on a 1080 or smaller monitor to decrease the size of the compression artifacts. This footage was pretty noisy originally and YouTube's compression seems to have done a number on it again. The gfycat link might even be better...

https://gfycat.com/LinedDishonestLabradorretriever

I saw the awesome video from Marco Langbroek (https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/05/wowowow-spectacular-view-of-spacex.html) yesterday and wanted to try my hand at catching a wide-field view of the still-unfurling Starlink test constellation. Turns out I WAS able to catch the main train, and even got a bunch of the "stragglers" I believe are now under power and actively separating from the pack.

I used a Sony a6000 with a Samyang 12mm f/2.0 all the way open, and I was talking 1/2" exposures with an iso of 3200. I had to push the iso pretty hard to get short enough exposures not to turn the entire satellite train into a single blur - they were moving at about 1 degree/sec and I'm used to taking pictures of stars that only move a degree every four minutes… So even with some really heavy noise reduction in lightroom and some deflickering in matlab, please excuse the noisy image - I don't have a low-light-designed "video" camera. These images were taken at 1 fps (fastest my intervelometer goes) and played back at 30x speed.

I was on Campus Point at UCSB looking southeast towards Santa Cruz Island. I was expecting some noise in the prediction (https://www.n2yo.com/?s=74001) based on the nature of these satellites, so set up my gear in advance, barely catching the train as it arrived about 10 minutes early.

Music Credits:

I Dunno by grapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

http://ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626

New Land by ALBIS is licensed under a Creative Commons license