Making satellites visible during daylight ranging

[Georg]

Hi everybody from Graz !

During our last visit at Potsdam SLR station in March 2016, Lutz Grunwaldt showed us CCD images of short visible flashes of Envisat during a daylight tracking session - a surprise for us !

We have now installed a proper CCD in our detection package, and have started to visualize at least large targets during daylight tracking; we expect it to be quite useful when tracking e.g. debris using TLE with larger TB values etc....

We have started now to fill a list, which targets we have seen already during daylight... maybe I can report more about, when I am back from a 3 week holiday, which will start tomorrow :-)

Any other experiences with that ?

Georg

[IgIg]

I, too, once in the daytime saw GLONASS, when the satellite was well illuminated by the sun. I think that should be visible Ajisai.

[delpino@riga]

In the early 90's while tracking in Cuba, I also saw ERS-1 several times in daylight, using the 60 cm main mirror guiding ocular with a dicroic mirror blocking the 532 band.
Will be interesting to try using a CCD with enhanced IR sensitivity and/or a combination of filters to improve the contrast.
Let's share any experience on this topic!

[Matt Wilkinson]

Hi Georg

Do you have any more details on how to do this? What equipment do you use?  And can you post an image?

Matt

[ZhipengLiang]

We in Changchun also saw Envisat in daylight. Attached is the screenshot when that happened. It was morning. Ignore that system time, it was wrong. The satellite and the beam can both be seen. We used 532nm band pass filter to let in the laser back-scatter, but Envisat was so bright that it is also visible.