Me too…

Forums General Discussion Starlink Flares? Me too…

#584302
Dominic Ford
Keymaster

Like Alex, I’ve also been seeing these flares among the captures from my two meteor cameras. The most I’ve ever picked up is 3-5 satellites, but the Pi Gazing software deliberately masks out pixels that seem to be scintillating, which probably works quite well as an unintentional Starlink mask (after the first few members of the chain have gone past, at least).

One feature I added to Pi Gazing over my Easter break was the ability to automatically identify satellites by correlating their positions with orbital elements downloaded from CelesTrak. All of the hard orbital mechanics is calculated by Python’s SGP4 module. I also do the same with aircraft, using a separate Raspberry Pi which records the ADS-B positional squitters of any aircraft within 15 km. (In the long term, I’m wondering about using this dataset to improve my fitting of the radial lens distortion in my cameras).

Here’s one example, from April. Three satellites, about one minute apart, all positively identified as Starlink:

https://pigazing.dcford.org.uk/moving_obj.php?id=20210418_202953_90449fcaf6b4a614
https://pigazing.dcford.org.uk/moving_obj.php?id=20210418_202855_04b04a118e8cb850
https://pigazing.dcford.org.uk/moving_obj.php?id=20210418_202742_4ad72653031ba119

There’s a full list of my satellite sightings here… https://pigazing.dcford.org.uk/search_satellites.php… though it’s not been updated since 2 May.