Geostationary satellite near IC 594

by Alain Klotz

1. Instrumental design

I observed about 300 galaxies by clear night since 1 feb 2000 with a fully automatized LX200 telescope (8" diameter). The CCD is an Audine equiped by an Kaf-401E chip (grade 0 quality). The camera has no shutter. An "unsmearing" algorithm is used after the dark correction. The flat correction is not performed. Each image is integrated 60 seconds with a binning 2x2 (sampling is 4.4 arcsec/pixel). About 300 to 400 fields are recorded each night. A quick visu software, named SNVisu, was created with the AudeLA platform. It allows to see the night image (at left) and the reference image (at right) on the same screen.

2. Images

The screen copy below indicate the DATE-OBS of the images (UT). North is up and East is right (mirror).
A geostationanry stellite run in these image of 60 seconds. This not identified satellite should have an inclined orbit (i > 5 degres). Observatory coordinates are (2d02'11.5" E and 43d38'35.4"N, alt=148m, GPS measured).

It is seen again at tomorrow (very lucky because exactly 23h56m16s later, not far from 23h56m04s !!!) :

The object is marked on these following screens :