There are at least 7 satellites in the geostationary orbit located at 19.2 degrees E longitude and owned by the Luxembourg company SES (Societe Europeenne des Satellites). The generic name for SES's satellites is "ASTRA"
On 2003 March 11th at about 9.30pm I found the satellites in my non-driven 8" Celestron telescope. I identified seven of them by the fact that they were not drifting out of the field of view. I guessed their brightnesses as around mag10 to mag13. Even the faintest was easily visible using both 40mm and 10mm eyepieces. They were just all within the field of view of the 10mm eyepiece (about 0.2degree).
I left the telescope on them and watched again at about 10.20pm. Over the next 3 minutes they all disappeared as they went into the Earth's shadow. An hour or so later they were back. Their relative positions had changed somewhat since the initial observation. This is because their orbits are not exactly in the equatorial plane and their orbit periods are 23 hours 56 minutes.
At around midnight I made a CCD image of them using the 10" Meade LX200 telescope and ST7e camera with the telescope drive turned off. The picture is shown above where the starlike objects are the satellites and the trails are passing stars during the 5 second exposure. I have measured the apparent magitudes of the satellites as 10.5, 10.9, 11.1, 11.1, 11.2, 12.0. I could not measure the one in the star trail. The different magnitudes almost certainly reflect the different physical sizes of the several generations of ASTRA satellites. If you want to find them tonight (12 March) or subsequently point your telescope 1.3degrees north of star Alphard (Alpha Hydrae) at 2042 precisely or 25 arcminutes north of NGC3115 (Spindle galaxy) at 2120 precisely Subtract 4 minutes from these times for each subsequent night. The satellites go into eclipse at 2222, getting only slightly earlier each night Back