File:Double Iridium Flare Satellites plus ISS.jpg

For kicks.. here is the shot with the ISS going through it just before!

This is my second attempt at an iridium flare and it turned out great! Iridium communications is a company that launched a grid of satellite clusters that covers the entire planet to provide constant satellite-phone connectivity anywhere. There are about 90 of them, but about 20 of them have died including one that smashed into a Russian satellite in 2009. What you are looking at is sunlight reflecting of the door-sized antennas, glinting directly back into my camera. These flares can be predicted fairly accurately so I knew these two flares would occur within 2 minutes of each other. The bright one on the left is Iridium 37 which is still operational, but the duller on on the right is Iridium 4 which went offline about 4 years ago and has since been replaced with another (they launched enough to have some redundancy built into the grid). I was lucky to get this because I only decided to run outside 10 minutes before it was due. The camera battery was flashing red and about to die, I had no time to focus or frame the shot. 3 minutes before it happened the ISS went though the frame as well but I didn’t add it to this shot as the exposure was wrong. I took the first shot and got the small flare, took the second shot and got the large flare – and then my camera screen flashed up “CARD FULL”! Talk about a close call. 2 x 30s / f2.8 / ISO 1600 / Canon 70D / Tokina 11mm / Nebulosity + Photoshop CC.