Posted by D Gray at 10:24 on 2012 Apr 13
Many thanks for that Nick,As I say not really my thing but some curiosity nonetheless! I had my first sighting of one of these a couple of decades back whilst viewing FU Orionis and as with the Saturn-field it is a little disconcerting following objects in their diurnal motion and encountering ‘stars’ going the wrong way! Some years back I spotted a very slow moving 8th mag. object passing near Saturn in a roughly n/s direction. Howard Miles told me that it was likely a Russian telecommunications satellite and probably over Russia at the time!! He informed that they were not geostationary but had a very elliptical orbit -thus spending much of their time far out.David.