[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Riding the Back of a Unicorn...

[Mike McCabe]

...into a Snake Pit!
Greetings Sky Enthusiasts,
Last night, after a splendid Cosmic Coffeehouse session, I stepped outside to a sky that was breaking open after the late-afternoon storms we experienced. Gazing up to the holes in the clouds, I spied a fairly bright 'star' moving across the sky - or so I thought at least. A funny thing can happen to our perception sometimes when we're looking up and the clouds are moving across the sky - sometimes we get the feeling that the stars are moving when they're actually stationary, but it's an illusion and once you settle down everything tends to correct itself. 
But once I got a fix on the stationary stars that I could see, I realized that the first 'moving star' I saw really was tracing a path across the sky. I knew from recent research that the ISS passes have been early morning affairs of late, so it wasn't that, and there's really only one other thing near that brightness that can move like that - Tiangon!

The Chinese space station was on a long overhead pass last night when I caught sight of it by happenstance. It was a unique pass in the sense that it came and went from sight as it passed over openings in the clouds. That magnitude -2.2 brightness at maximum altitude even bored through some of the cloud cover!
Once that was over and noticing that there was significant clearing to the west, I decided to stay on the Heavens Above site and check in on the most recent Starlink launch. Sure enough, just a few minutes before 9pm would be when they would be visible in the western sky, so this time I did a little more prep for it.

Dimmer by about a magnitude and disappearing about 20° lower on this evening than they did last night, I knew they would be more challenging to catch but still they should be visible. My western sky is pretty bright down low, and believe it or not magnitude 3.1 can be challenging in that muck.

Had I not checked the pass chart I might've missed the satellites entirely. Their pass on Tuesday night was significantly more horizontal and southwesterly than the one on Monday night. Using this and my cell phone on a tripod, I took test shots to get the framing I wanted (and actually the best I could achieve from my vantage point with all the trees and whatnot). Then I just waited.

This train of Starlink satellites, formally known as launch # G6-730, are still mostly close together in this picture taken only two and a half days after launch, but they were clearly starting to separate from each other. Still, the whole shebang only took thirty seconds to pass any given point in the sky. It'll still be a couple of days before they start to split into individual objects from a naked eye perspective, but by then they'll be too dim and too low to make any significant visual impact.

If the sky is clear tonight as the 9pm hour is approaching, and if you've got a decently low western horizon, and if you're up for a little binocular challenge, then put Orion's belt in your view a little before 8:56pm and hold steady... in about 20 seconds or so you should see the train pass directly below the belt. According to the pass details it should take about two minutes for all 27 satellites to pass through your view, and if you have a means of mounting your binoculars on a tripod this could make for a really fun viewing experience.
Keep Looking Up!.....but in this case, horizontal will do.  
Sincerely,
Mike M.
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