How to take photos and videos of Starlink satellites
Starlink Satellite Tracks over London
SpaceX is currently developing a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to provide communication services. The satellites in this Starlink constellation are launched in batches of 60 and take time to spread out. So initially they will fly in very similar orbits, so as they appear to fly in a train, one after the other. These can be seen as moving points of light in the sky, if you know where to look.
I use the FindStarLink web site to identify passes over where I live (London) and ClearOutside to see if there’ll be clouds or not - though nothing beats looking out of the window!
Having found if there’s a pass overhead I head out to my local park where there aren’t any streetlights so I have a clear view of the night’s sky and set up my camera.
As well as the photo above, I also made the video below:
So how did I make the photo and video?
Firstly the gear. You can use a mobile phone if you have something to keep it steady (such as tripod), but I used the Sony A7iii camera with the 24mm F1.4 lens on a Manfrotto BeFree tripod.
The next thing were the settings. The basic approach was to take a whole series of photos and then either merge them together (to make the photo) or use each photo as a frame (to make the video).
I used the 24mm F1.4 lens as it has a wide aperture (i.e. lets in lots of light) which makes it ideal for astrophotography but also it has a wide field of view, so you can see a large part of the night’s sky. I wanted to see a lot of the Starlink tracks plus also the Ursa Major, the Great Bear as background.
It’s also nice to have some foreground, to give some context, so I made sure one of the trees was just visible at the bottom of the frame.
A key question was the exposure time and I’ve tried both 1 second and 5 seconds. The latter looks better for the photo as it leads shorter gaps where the camera is processing the image but leads to jerkier video.
In this case, the camera was programmed to take a stack of 600 odd photos, one a second, each of one second in duration. The aperture was fixed at F1.4 and auto-ISO used to adjust for the lighting conditions, which was changing quite rapidly at the time (around 9 pm).
Having taken the photos these were then processed using a set of tools, including:
CaptureOne used to sharpen the RAW images and ensure all had the same settings (e.g. set the same white balance to 5300 Kelvin) when exporting to JPEG
Affinity Photos was used to stack the JPEG images into a single photo (at the top) using the “maximum” option
Premier Pro was used to convert the JPEG images into a video stream. I tried both 4K and HD as intermediate output and when uploaded to YouTube the HD was actually better
So that’s how it was done - any questions let me know at info@noctilucents.com
