I thought this was pretty cool: There’s a group of amateur observers around the world that have made a hobby out of finding and tracking US spy satellites. They have a site called Heavens-Above where they post their data and provide tools for calculating when a given satellite will be visible in your area. Wired has a great article about this group and what the government has been doing to try and ‘hide’ the satellites from them… it’s harder than you might think.

The article starts off with this interesting anecdotal story:

Sometime around dawn on the first day of the 1991 Gulf War, Ted Molczan was woken by a mysterious phone call. Molczan had been up until 3:30 am in his Toronto apartment, riveted by the televised images of Tomahawk missiles raining down on Baghdad, so he was groggy when the phone rang. A male voice with a thick accent said: “I know you’re involved in satellite tracking. I’m interested in doing a trade.” The caller offered Molczan information on the orbiting patterns of a constellation of eight US satellites. In exchange, he wanted to know the orbits for the CIA’s KH-11 “Keyhole” satellites - from space they can discern an object as small as a softball, and they were sending US forces hi-res digital imagery of Iraq and Kuwait.

You can read the full article HERE.