The Man Who Hunts Spy Satellites

People have the right to know that there are spy satellites above their heads, and not only spy satellites, but all kinds of satellites. And by a clear night, they can see all the satellites passing over their heads. So in a sense, they are not so secret. Yes, I think that it may interest some people to know that these satellites are visible, and even that we can catch some details with a telescope-- like a game, spying spy satellites. We are in the Astronomy and Space encounter, the main forum or encounter place for astronomy in France. It happens every two years, and there are several thousand visitors during three days. My speech is about, of course, photography of space station and other satellites, like geostationary satellites or other funny satellites. My name is Thierry Legault. I'm an engineer. I live in the suburbs of Paris. My hobby is astronomy, and more precisely astrophotography. It's a nice feeling to be able to transmit our passion to other people and help them through to practice and to do the same kind of photography as I do-- or better, I hope. And I would like to try to find all the ways to be different because I like to do things that have never been done. This website called Heavens Above gives us the list of the brightest satellites visible in the evening tonight. And a good candidate is the Cosmos 1782 because it's quite bright. It's an intelligence satellites-- Russian intelligence satellite. So I go into the other website, which is CalSky, to get some calculations. When I was a teenager, I asked my parents to buy a small telescope. And then I was the happiest child in the world with my telescope, looking at the stars, the moon. And then I continue with a lot bigger means now, and bigger telescopes and cameras, but in the same principle. The satellite will come from there, like this, over the house like that. I got started watching satellites quite by chance. Six years ago, I've been writing a book about astrophotography. And since I wanted to take all of the photos for the book, I needed any kind of a photo of the sky including the passage of the space station in front of the sun. So I took one. And I said, OK, this is funny, so took a picture of the space station and the space shuttle just beside, just after undocking. And this photo has had big success on CNN, and the "Guardian," and "Popular Science," and a lot of magazines in France and also in other countries in the world. And so I continued to take such shots. OK, good. More than three years ago, I contacted a friend of a friend, which is named Emmanuel Rietsch, to modify my mount to be able to track, automatically, the satellites. Basically, there were two parts in the project. The first part was to make the mount able to track the satellite manually, with a joystick, like a joystick of a video game. And so the second part of the project has been to make the system, and especially the software, with an additional camera, tracking camera, able to track to satellites automatically. This is a Unix system. In a matter of-- thank you, Emmanuel. This telescope will take the high resolution video of the satellite. This one is used just to track the satellite with a second camera. There would be the main camera here, second camera here. And this one is to center the satellite visually, just at the beginning, when it appears, to be sure that it's visible through this camera. With the solar or lunar transit, almost all of them are successful-- 95% or more. But for satellites like that, it's much less. It's, say, 50%. Sometimes there are some clouds. Sometimes they are too faint. Sometimes computers don't want to work exactly as you want. Especially, just at the critical moment, you have a blue screen saying, everything is crashed. It happens sometimes. Astrophotography is not something that's very easy. The stars, and the nebulas, and the galaxies are faint. The planets are small, and so it's quite difficult. Light pollution is a very, very big problem for astronomers because they have to go farther and farther from the cities. And it's just like people are prisoners in a prison of light because they can't see outside this prison of light. They don't see the nature, and the stars, and the Milky Way. So in my opinion, light pollution, is a kind of prison. So I have to align everything first on a star, the polar star, which will appear later. And then, after all this alignment, I have to focus the camera on the star. And then I have to change the alignment in the mount to align it on the trajectory of the satellite in the sky. So far. The weather is the biggest enemy of the astronomer because the telescope that looks through the clouds doesn't exist. Unfortunately we see some clouds coming over the area of Paris. Paris is the red dot in the north of France here. And so we'll have a sky which that is partly cloudy so we need some chance. It's not the funniest part of the game, driving and trying to find clear skies. But when it's successful, it's more rewarding, let's say. All the clouds are coming now. The sky is completely covered. And this is one of the reasons why we go in sunny countries to observe the sky. OK, we have quite a hole, but other ones coming after. These clouds coming again. I think it's over. It's full of clouds now. This is a pity. They have clouds everywhere, so nature has won. She's always the stronger, at the end. I'm a little bit sad, of course, but I know that it's a risk. So if I don't want to take the risk, I'd just stay on my sofa watching TV. And so it's a part of the risk. Of course, I'm not very happy. But an activity where there is no in risk, and where you win every time, it's something that is too easy. I photograph satellites because it's difficult. It's a kind of challenge with myself. And each time I say, OK, you succeed or not. And next time, can you do better? Can do another satellite? Something else? Something more difficult? So it's a way to improve my skill with a telescope. And yeah, it's like a game or a challenge with myself. Next time, I will get them.