&x1F50D; Click to zoom
Rising out of the treeline into open sky, two consecutive 60-second exposures are combined in the image. The satellite first appears at 03:14:21 as it catches the pre-dawn sun and fades out in the next minute as the reflected light then misses us on the ground. It moves too quickly for a plane, but too slowly to be a meteor or lightning. It's also the perfect window of time at the end of the night to reflect the sun yet be against a dark sky. From its sweep rate of about 0.30 degrees per second we can calculate that it's about 500 km up in low Earth orbit.