Apparent satellite flares as seen in Artemis II photo timelapse

[jdog]

A reddit user put together a gif timelapse of the Artemis II photos showing the approach to Earth, and it revealed lots of little sparkly things in low orbit as seen from the nightside, most visible on the right and the left around the equator. (Bright thing on the right is Venus.)

They've generally been identified as satellites, presumably flaring, possibly Starlink?

If verified, might be a good example for showing people what flaring satellites generally look like. (I embedded the gif, but gifs are either not allowed or image compression has flattened it.)

It's been making the rounds on social media and got a mention on Hank Green's vlog:

 

[yoshy]

This website was the first thing I thought of when I watched that Hank Green video! I'm glad that he used the word "train" (can't remember if he said "starlink train", "satellite train", or something like that). Hopefully Google results will lead to discussions here so that people can learn that they are certainly satellites.

 

[Mick West]

I've done a little work on getting it into Sitrec:
https://www.metabunk.org/sitrec/?custom=1/Atremis Starlink/20260508_005857.js


It's a little fiddly lining it up, as I don't have an exact ECEF fix on Artemis. I was using the Artemis timeline site for time and altitude of the photo (ART002-E-25497), then manually adjusting

The timeline isn't working, but it gave the time of this one as 8:29:11 PM EDT. And 39463000 feet (but in miles)

https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ART002&roll=E&frame=25497

Try holding down C while moving the cursor over the globe. Note the large changes in flares, and then see how Venus moves. I think this one is reasonable.