Quote:
Originally Posted by trickybilly
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That's a good question and I'm not sure how you'd find out the apparent magnitude of spacecraft like Maven. You could try the JPL Solar System Simulator (
http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/) but I'm not sure if it'll do what you need.
I thought a good place to start would be to see if one could spot satellites in a geosynchronous Earth orbit and a quick Google found this page:
http://www.satobs.org/geosats.html
While Some of the interplanetary spacecraft will have bigger solar arrays than most of the GEO sats they're so far away that I think they'll be much too faint even to image with big scopes, dark skies, and sensitive CCDs let alone observe through a dob.
Maybe try spotting some GEO sats first and then wait until a Mars, or other outer planet, spacecraft is launched and try and spot it on it's way out but while it's still in Earth's neighbourhood
