Cosmic perspectives

(move your mouse over the picture to see the Baidu M1 Rocket trail on a single 60s shot)
The other night, I took some pictures of the famous Leo triplet, Messier 65, Messier 66 and NGC 3628. The atmosphere was amazingly stable and so I went on to try to record 1 hour of 60sec exposures. It turned out that only 27 of the 60 pictures had good enough tracking to be used for the final picture, but result turned out pretty good (mouse over the picture to see the difference between one 60 sec shot and the stacked processed result).

One interesting thing I discovered while reviewing the raw shots is that on 2 of them, I had captured a trail. After quick measurement, it was something moving at about 26' per minute. Clearly too slow for a plane or a low altitude satellite. Calsky.com, the excellent satellite viewing prediction website, proved to be remarkebly useful in finding what it was. It turns out that this trail was the Baidu M1 rocket (orbital details), launched in 2007, and orbiting on a very elliptic orbit (523km x 21046km). At the time of passage, it was distant by 6707km.


Exposure Data

• Lens: Newtown Perl-Vixen 130/720
• F/stop: f/5.5 (focal)
• Mount: Perl Vixen Super Polaris mount

• Exposure: 27 min total exposure, composed of:
• 27 x 60 sec (120 min) unfiltered RGB @ ISO 1600 Canon 500D
• Mode: Raw
• White Balance: Auto
• Calibration: Flat, Darks and Offset in DeepSkyStacker
• Processing: Standard deep-sky adjustment in Photoline

• Date Start 2011-Apr-09 02h02 BST, 2011-Apr-09 03h13 BST
• Temp: 9C, 8C
• Location: West Witterings, UK