"A geosynchronous satellite doesn't move, right?" That's the question I was asked every time I mentioned the idea of trying to image a geosynchronous satellite with the Faulkes Telescope North.
"No it moves relative to the background of stars. The stars don't move. We do and the satellite moves with us." That's the challenge is that the Faulkes Telescopes naturally track the stars. They weren't designed to track satellites.
When an intern who works with me started talking about imaging a geosynchronous satellite. I decided to that this was an interesting challenge. We looked online and found some big satellites that we might be able to see. After a few calculations, and a bit of guess work we were ready to try.
We only had half an hour and our calculations are off by a bit, and for the first several images we had no luck. For our last image we tried a long integration time to increase our chances of catching the satellite if our timing was off by a bit. Sure enough in our final image we had a streak that runs clear across the image. You can take a look at our image of Anik F3 here: http://lcogt.net/observations/ogg/2m0a/624819
Happy hunting!