I really love this image of Castor and Pollux shortly after being deployed from STS-127.

Both ANDE-2 satellites were successfully launched from STS-127 at 17:23utc July 30th over Texas, USA. Below, in the Youtube movie from OZ9AEC, the deployment starts at 05:13:

I don’t have a particularly effective satellite receive set-up (no steerable aerials, just an omnidirectional vertical aerial) for attempting to monitor these, but now and again, I’m able to receive a telemetry packet. Here is one from today:

1k2: fm POLLUX-1 to CQ via TELEM ctl UI pid=F0(Text) len 100 12:55:47
0000 MEMS 1017126 24.06 23.112 21.09 -1.02 -0.03 0.558 -8.31 -2.63 5.
0040 30 25.54 26.81 26.17 2.60 1 14 52 ..

For some reason, I find it pretty cool to receive something other than TV from a satellite in space, maybe it’s the fact that they have a finite lifetime, who knows, but I still like the picture!