Quote:
Originally Posted by pluto
I think trickybilly means he/she wants to track the position of spacecraft over days/weeks/months and wasn't referring to satellites in orbit around the Earth that would move quite quickly across the sky.
The spacecraft mentioned in that link are all either in orbit around the sun or on an escape trajectory out of the Solar system.
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I would think that getting a visual on any spacecraft which is not in Earth orbit would be impossible.
As an example - the first spacecraft on the OP's link
http://theskylive.com/spacecraft is the Rosetta spacecraft, which is currently travelling with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is about 428 million km from Earth.
http://sci.esa.int/where_is_rosetta/
Given that the comet is about 4 km across, and has a visual magnitude of +18.6 as seen from Earth, I don't think you'll have much luck spotting the spacecraft, which measures 32 m from tip to tip of the solar panel array.
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Sp...osetta_orbiter
Considering objects a bit closer to home - the asteroid that the OP mentioned (16 Psyche) is about 253
kilometres across, and is about 263 million km away, giving a Visual Magnitude of +9.9. Again, no man-made object (measured in at most a few tens of metres across) is going to be visible at these sorts of distances.