[Leica] UFOs?

[Richard Clompus]

Aram, I suspect you viewed a string of Starlink satellites from SpaceX.  Its an Elon Musk project to bring internet service from low earth orbit.  It's still in the testing phase. The satellites are photobombing astronomical images.  Some astronomers are quite up set about this.  His newer versions are positioning their solar panels to reflect less light back to Earth making them less visible.  The future has arrived.

Be well,
Richard

Richard Clompus
California

> On May 22, 2021, at 11:52 AM, Aram Langhans via LUG <lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
> 
> We tried a few night shots one day while in Yosemite.  I pulled up to Valley View and hopped out of the van and saw the strangest thing.  A whole line of lights moving across the sky from west to the east, one right after another.  Like a military convoy of planes.  One other person was there and he said they just started and he counted 36 of them so far.  I quickly set up the Q2 and did a rough manual focus on the stars and got this shot. I was lucky.  I did not have time to play around with the focus or even where I was aiming the camera.  As it turn out I learned later these were satellites for the StarLink internet program of Elon Musk, the destroyer of astrophotography if you read some articles about that program.  So, here is my quick grab shot.  I guess there were 60 in all and I got the tail end.
> 
> f2.0, 8 sec, ISO 800.  Had to brighten it up quite a bit in LR.
> 
> Valley View Stars-1000161 (leica-users.org) <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/Aram/s21/y/Valley+View+Stars-1000161.jpg.html> 
> 
> Comments welcome.
> 
> -- 
> Aram Langhans
> (Semi) Retired Science Teacher
> & Unemployed photographer
> “The Human Genome Project has proved Darwin more right than Darwin himself would ever have dared dream.”   James D. Watson
> 
> 
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