Starlink : Satellite Spotting

[rsdavis9]

Anyone having any luck spotting Starlink "sky trains"?

I'm using Heavens Above, and stayed up until after 4am this morning, trying to spot the Starkink 8 sats. A pass was predicted at mag 1.7, becoming visible right near Jupiter and Saturn (thus easy to spot, I thought).

I'm in a fairly dark sky (well away from cities and towns) high altitude location in northern Arizona, and I have absolutely no trouble at all seeing Polaris as a bright star (even at partial disk and dawn) at mag 8.7 with unaided vision (it's one of the few stars I can both identify and name). Jupiter and Saturn were very, very bright.  Yet, even alternating good binoculars with unaided eyesight, I could not see ANY sats along the Starlink predicted path, though I did spot a couple of sats (including one heading ENE) but none even close to Starlink's predicted path and heading. I kept trying for about ten minutes, just in case.

I've tried Starlink train spotting several times in recent months, always within a few days of launch, and so far, nothing.

   

Polaris is at a visual magnitude of 2.0.
The 8.7 magnitude is for one of the components of the tripple star system.
I tried to see the last launch(L7) a few days after launch. I saw one object and a flash from one nearby. I have a friend and he saw 43 but with binoculars.

So the  new attitude while raising seems to have dropped the magnitude to around 5 or 6.

[Thorny]

Anyone having any luck spotting Starlink "sky trains"?

I saw them from San Angelo, Texas 100 minutes after launch on Saturday morning. I was outside my apartment complex surrounded by security and street lights and had no trouble seeing them. Somewhere between Magnitude 1 and 2, I'd say. The length of the train was about twice, maybe three times the diameter of the full moon. I saw a sporadic flasher half a train length behind the train itself, maybe Stage 2 or one of the Skysats?

I have a video taken with my phone, but the quality is not great.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i6trlfugqbxc00l/Starlink%208%20Flyover.mp4?dl=0

[Ghoti]

Anyone having any luck spotting Starlink "sky trains"?

I'm using Heavens Above, and stayed up until after 4am this morning, trying to spot the Starkink 8 sats. A pass was predicted at mag 1.7, becoming visible right near Jupiter and Saturn (thus easy to spot, I thought).

I'm in a fairly dark sky (well away from cities and towns) high altitude location in northern Arizona, and I have absolutely no trouble at all seeing Polaris as a bright star (even at partial disk and dawn) at mag 8.7 with unaided vision (it's one of the few stars I can both identify and name). Jupiter and Saturn were very, very bright.  Yet, even alternating good binoculars with unaided eyesight, I could not see ANY sats along the Starlink predicted path, though I did spot a couple of sats (including one heading ENE) but none even close to Starlink's predicted path and heading. I kept trying for about ten minutes, just in case.

I've tried Starlink train spotting several times in recent months, always within a few days of launch, and so far, nothing.

   

Seems like the Starlink sats are much less visible than you'd imagine from the uproar. I've tried to spot several trains with little success. A train of 9 from L6  went overhead and I was only able to see one of them. The full set of newly launched L7 wasn't visible to me at all. I've been using "See a Satellite Tonight" to spot them and it even shows you where to spot them with your neighborhood street view images to make it very clear.

[rsdavis9]

Anyone having any luck spotting Starlink "sky trains"?

I saw them from San Angelo, Texas 100 minutes after launch on Saturday morning. I was outside my apartment complex surrounded by security and street lights and had no trouble seeing them. Somewhere between Magnitude 1 and 2, I'd say. The length of the train was about twice, maybe three times the diameter of the full moon. I saw a sporadic flasher half a train length behind the train itself, maybe Stage 2 or one of the Skysats?

I have a video taken with my phone, but the quality is not great.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i6trlfugqbxc00l/Starlink%208%20Flyover.mp4?dl=0

From a different thread it appears that the S2 is dumped on the first orbit off of western mexico.

[rsdavis9]

So I wonder if the different magnitude is related to hours/days after launch. When first launched they probably are not adjusting attitude for a while(days?). My observation(or lack of) was 2 days after launch.

[Semmel]

Heavens above is pretty good, but doesn't know everything. Make sure it has your exact geo coordinates. Also expect to have +-5 min in the actual timing and maybe small changes in position. Also, the sats sometimes are in earth shadow for parts of their pass at your location.
I spotted the previous train only above 60 deg above horizon. Jupiter is pretty low on the northern hemisphere right now, I would not expect to see starlink near it at moment.

[ZChris13]

Anyone having any luck spotting Starlink "sky trains"?

I had an excellent pass on June 4th, which was ~24 hours after a launch. If you want to see them you need them to be freshly launched, it seems.

[Tonelyr]

Hey everyone,

We made a small website to track and get information about all starlink satellites in sky right now.
We'd like to hear your comments and opinion about the website, here's the link https://starlinkradar.com/ (I don't know if it's authorized, if it's not, I will remove the post)

If some are interested in this project, you can contact us on one of these two email adresses :
[email protected] , [email protected]

Thank you all and have a wonderful day !

[rsdavis9]

Hey everyone,

We made a small website to track and get information about all starlink satellites in sky right now.
We'd like to hear your comments and opinion about the website, here's the link https://starlinkradar.com/ (I don't know if it's authorized, if it's not, I will remove the post)

If some are interested in this project, you can contact us on one of these two email adresses :
[email protected] , [email protected]

Thank you all and have a wonderful day !

Can you give a brief guide to the meaning of "adjusted elevation" and "cap angle"

[Tonelyr]

Hi rsdavis9,

The cap angle is the Spherical cap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cap), but you replace the sphere as the Earth and the h paramater is the elevation of the satellite from Earth center . It's based on the Spherical Earth Model

The adjusted elevation parameter is the quotient of altitude (in m) divided by Earth radius ( in m).

Hope you like our tracker and we'd love to hear your feedback.

Have a nice evening.

Tonelyr.

[bulkmail]

Hey everyone,

We made a small website to track and get information about all starlink satellites in sky right now.
We'd like to hear your comments and opinion about the website, here's the link https://starlinkradar.com/ (I don't know if it's authorized, if it's not, I will remove the post)

If some are interested in this project, you can contact us on one of these two email adresses :
[email protected] , [email protected]

Thank you all and have a wonderful day !

Great work!

Do you show somehow the orbital height (340km, 550km, etc.) - color, hovering tooltip, etc. (in general would be nice if hover/click on satellite gives more info - unique ID, launch, Ku/Ka/inter-link/V, etc.)?
Can you make a toggle to show the coverage of the ground stations?
When zooming out can you switch to a spherical globe instead of flat projection (to avoid the distortion of the poles)?

[Suzy]

Did I see a batch of Starlink satellites passing over Melbourne this morning, around 5:15 a.m.? Quite a stunning and unexpected sight if they were - all traveling in a line northeast!
Edit: yes they were! What were these lights in the sky over eastern Australia?

[AndrewRG10]

Suzy's comment actually re-sparked my hunt to see these satellites. I haven't bothered getting up for them since they put shades on then.
So this morning I went out and saw the L23 satellites and they're still as bright as Saturn. Even 30 minutes before sunrise in a suburban city living they're visible with the naked eye.

So yeh don't give up trying to look for them, turn on your notifications for whatever app you use, they're very much still visible for your enjoyment

[Citabria]

HA predicted an overhead pass of 40+ Starlinks in 5 minutes at 2.6 magnitude tonight. Easy naked eye, right? The track was between the Big Dipper and Leo, so easy to spot. Well, they were not visible except as brief but bright flashes in Leo's hindquarters, more like Iridium flares.

[CJ]

I've been trying to spot a skytrain for a while, with no success. Until today that is, when I saw one purely by accident. I was outside just after twilight at approx 9pm Arizona time, and glanced up to see a long string of very bright (a bit brighter than the typical bright stars in the sky, about twice the brightness of Polaris) lights heading a bit east of north. For a minute or so, they stretched across most of the sky. The gap between them looked fairly (though not exactly) uniform, at about 1 degree of arc (two full moons). 

They were spectacular, and I'm very glad I've finally seen them.

In case it helps anyone, I'll mention that they were at around 45 degrees elevation to my west, just after local twilight. I'm guessing that the sun angle on them has a lot to do with their apparent magnitude.

For anyone out there who has yet to see a skytrain, I assure you it's well worth the effort.

Edit: I have now identified this skytrain, and to my surprise it's the April 29th launch (L24), NOT the May 4th launch as I'd assumed. 

[laszlo]

I just had eye surgery to remove cataracts last week. That also got rid of my lifelong astigmatism at the same time. The difference is phenomenal! I was able to easily spot all 7 major stars in the Pleiades with a possible 7th and 8th with the naked eye. I also saw the Andromeda galaxy with naked eyes, even though I live in a light-polluted suburb. Jupiter's Galilean moons are easy with a 10x25 set of binoculars.

The relevance of all this to this thread is that while I was trying out my new eyes, every 5 to 10 minutes a new very dim satellite would pass overhead. They were visible in 7x50 binoculars as they traveled across the Milky Way, generally north/south, about 2 hours after sunset, but invisible to the naked eye. This went on for about 45 minutes before I headed inside. Since I was mostly interested in what I could see, I wasn't keeping any proper notes so I don't have any quantitative information like magnitude, inclination, angular speed, timing, etc. but I was wondering if this was similar to what experienced Starlink watchers have seen.

The next morning I watched a pair of satellites crossing Orion. They were as bright as his sword, one was going more or less west/east and the other was angled about 30 degrees higher heading SW/NE. They actually crossed paths in Orion. This was about 2 hours before sunrise. Same question, is Starlink-like behavior?

I plan on getting set up again with proper tools (notebook, timer, voice recorder, star charts, etc.) for satellite tracking and will visit the Starlink tracking websites so I'll have some hard data to process soon.