Flashing light high in the night sky

[Grant_R]

Hi, I live in Whyalla, South Australia, about 6 months ago I bought a CELESTON 10” Dob using SKY SAFARI PRO 7 running the STARSENSE EXPLORER app to guide me around. I’ve been going out in my backyard & spending many enjoyable hours star hopping around the night sky, last night just before midnight (7th Nov. 2024) I spotted a stationary flashing light, no telescope at this stage. It flashed every 10 – 12 seconds, I viewed it through my scope with a 35mm TELE VUE PANOPTIC eyepiece, and seeing it wasn’t moving I swapped to my 9mm Explore Scientific 100° eyepiece which enabled me to see the faint dot that the flash was coming from. I watched it until about 1am (8th Nov. 2024) until I left it flashing away & went to bed.
My story is similar to Vanessa’s back in 2007.
https://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=26814
It was close to Neptune, screenshot taken at 12:29am of SkySafari app from my phone.
Did anybody else see this or has an answer?
Cheers
Grant

[Pierre_C]

Hi Grant.

I think what you described may have been a geostationary satellite.

There are a few of them known to be clustered near the position you described from your location at that time - roughly celestial coordinates 23 hours 50 minutes R.A., -5 degrees Dec., roughly corresponding to geographic coordinates 99 degrees east, 5 degrees south over Indonesia.

There is a list of geostationary satellites by real time geographic coordinates at https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=10&srt=11&dir=1&p=99999

Click on ‘longitude’, scroll down to around ’99 degrees E’ and then press the ‘track it’ button to see where the satellites are currently around that position.

I was not able to narrow it down to a specific satellite.

Regards.

[Pierre_C]

Also, you may be able to search in SkySafari for the names of the satellites on the N2YO list around that longitude to see if there is a match for your date, time and location.

[Astro1969]

Yes, my first thought was a geo satellite as well, though never seen it myself