Yet another "find" when cleaning the hard drive. This one from only a
few months ago. I was trying for an Arp galaxy at -7 degrees
declination but clouds moved in before I got any data. I'd accidentally
left the "auto save" turned on so my focus frames were captured. They
were 9 seconds and already dimmed by the clouds moving in. I never did
image the galaxy as by the time the weather cleared the moon was in the
way then it was too far west. So it will have to wait until next year.

I was about to purge the focus frames I'd accidentally saved when I saw
one had three streaks. Each horizontal and the same length. Then I
realized this was exactly the declination of the geostationary belt at
my latitude. Apparently three birds are stationed at the same position.
Only one can be working as the band width of a dish is wider than
their spacing of only a few minutes of arc. I checked and found that in
9 seconds they should trail 134" of arc at -7 degrees. Sure enough that
was the trail length. Direction right, length right and position right
so that has to be what these are. I may never image this galaxy however
as these birds are positioned every 2 degrees or so (closer and the
beams would overlap). That would be one bird every 7.5 minutes. What a
mess that would create. Hopefully they'd be at slightly different
declinations as these were and if I used a lot of frames so I could use
a sigma combine that might do the trick.

In any case this will be a tough object from my declination it appears.

Here's the 9 second focus frame dimmed severely by clouds. Image
reduced to 2.5" per pixel

Rick

--
Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct.
Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".

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