{"id":132,"date":"2020-05-05T04:55:16","date_gmt":"2020-05-05T04:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/?p=132"},"modified":"2020-10-03T18:45:43","modified_gmt":"2020-10-03T18:45:43","slug":"i-saw-a-starlink-satellite-train","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"I saw a Starlink satellite train!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Last night after sundown I happened to be outside looking up at the waxing gibbous moon when I saw a satellite zipping near it in low earth orbit.  And not far behind it another.  And another \u2013 all spaced roughly 15 seconds (travel time, north to south) apart on the same orbit.  They kept coming in what appeared to be an unbroken chain, and I could clearly see six to seven of them at a time.  That&#8217;s an astonishingly dense satellite network, so it made me wonder if it was part of the astonishingly large LEO satellite network being built by Starlink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today I tried to confirm what satellites I could have been seeing, and it looks like there was indeed a Starlink train passing overhead at that time.  The reason they were so close together is that Starlink satellites are launched 60 at a time in &#8220;trains&#8221; that gradually spread to the network&#8217;s operational altitude and separation.  I must have spotted this one near the beginning of its transit of my location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that was very exciting, but I didn&#8217;t have equipment adequate to record it.  Instead, here is a photo of a full moon I captured with a Nikon 7200 DX and 300mm lens last November:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1001\" height=\"1001\" src=\"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/WP\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/20191112-DSC_2396.jpg\" alt=\"Full moon photo by David Bookstaber\" class=\"wp-image-133\" srcset=\"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/WP\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/20191112-DSC_2396.jpg 1001w, https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/WP\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/20191112-DSC_2396-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/WP\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/20191112-DSC_2396-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/WP\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/20191112-DSC_2396-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/WP\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/20191112-DSC_2396-250x250.jpg 250w, https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/WP\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/20191112-DSC_2396-640x640.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1001px) 100vw, 1001px\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night after sundown I happened to be outside looking up at the waxing gibbous moon when I saw a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-skies","post-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/david.bookstaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}