Observing Spacecraft

Even though it has been a while since I've updated this blog I've still been doing a lot of backyard astronomy. I've been looking at all the usual stuff (comets, galaxies, asteroids, etc.), but I've also seen a lot of spacecraft. Most of them have been annoying to look at, like this trail from a geostationary satellite crossing into my image of part of the famous Orion Nebula:

Satellites are an ever increasing problem for astronomy as tens of thousands of them are being launched into low-Earth orbit. This is an annoyance for amateur astronomers, but can present serious problems for astronomical observatories both on Earth and in Earth orbit. 

Occasionally it is desirable and even useful to have a look at a satellite or spacecraft. For instance last  November the European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter made a close flyby of Earth.

The flyby, which brought the spacecraft less than 300 miles from Earth, was perfectly placed for telescopic observers in North America. Unistellar asked people within their network to observe the event in science mode for ESA and provided an ephemeris which made it easy to know exactly where to point a telescope to observe it. And it was pretty amazing to see.

I observed simultaneously with 2 eVscopes. One was collecting data in science mode, while the other took the image above. The line in the image above is a trailed image of the spacecraft which was visibly moving across the image as the exposure was being taken. The animated gif below shows a speeded up version of the motion of the spacecraft across the field of view (which is rotated from the image above).

The event was a success, I have heard that ESA was happy with the observation campaign and I am glad that I was able to contribute.

About a month later on Christmas day the James Webb Space Telescope finally launched into space and as it moved out to its permanent location in space it was visible to small telescopes here on the ground. 

Here is a sequence of images I took of JWST on January 1st, 2022.

It is visible in the image above as a streak moving from the center towards the upper right. JWST is poised to make significant contributions to astronomy and I was happy to be able to see it. I was one of several observers who contributed science observations of it and we were able to spot changes in brightness as the sunshield unfolded along with other results that will soon be published.

Finally, one other target of note: the International Space Station. The ISS is the largest and brightest of Earth's artificial satellites and it currently has seven people living there. Many amateur astronomers have taken spectacular images of the ISS that show tremendous detail and I was curious to know if I could even spot it at all using a telescope. Thankfully, Unistellar's Ephemeris Generator allows observers to point their telescope at the ISS. The Unistellar telescopes can't track the space station, but instead the telescope it pointed at where it will be at a particular time. 

My first attempt at spotting the station was successful, but the image was pretty terrible:

I was happy that I saw it all, but decided that I could do better and I June 1st I gave it another try. Here's what I saw:

If you blow up one of the frames it looks like this:

Much better. I suspect that I can still improve but the solar arrays, especially on the right, are clearly visible and it is vastly better than my first attempt from May. 

Clear skies!

Asteroid Encounters

This year I have observed more asteroids than ever before with 29 detected so far. Some them have been as a part of the Unistellar Citizen Science campaigns, but most of them have just been for fun. For instance, earlier this week I looked at the asteroid 626 Notburga which was in the constellation of Cassiopeia.

The image above is an animated gif of two images taken 75 minutes apart showing Notburga's motion though the sky. The individual exposures were short so it wasn't easy spot the nebula that was nearby it in the sky. So in between these two images I took a longer one to try to bring out a part of the Heart Nebula.
 

Here the asteroid appears as a line and there's some hint of the red hydrogen gas of the Heart Nebula across much of the upper right portion of the image. 

Since asteroids look like moving dots or streaks it is sometimes more interesting to catch them when they are near some other astronomical object in the sky. A great resource to find out when as asteroid will be near a bright star, a deep sky object or even another asteroid are the observing guides at MinorPlanet.info. I've used that to find all of the close encounters on this page.

Here are asteroids 712 Boliviana (top right) and 89 Julia (below center) from back in October:

Just this week asteroids 1 Ceres and 1140 Crimea have been passing the bright star Aldebaran.

Aldebaran is the bright star at center. Asteroid (and dwarf planet) 1 Ceres is the bright moving object to its lower right. Much fainter is 1140 Crimea. It is the faint moving dot in the upper left. At the time of the images Crimea was actually 25 million miles closer to Earth than Ceres. That doesn't help it much in brightness though because it is much smaller. 1146 Crimea is just 17 miles across while Ceres is 587 miles across!

In early October asteroid 27 Euterpe passed directly in front of one of my favorite globular star clusters: Messier 22. I caught the event on two nights as the asteroid was near the cluster, but it was cloudy the night it passed in front of it.

Euterpe is to the right of the cluster. At the time it was 21 light minutes from Earth, while the star cluster is some 10.600 light years away.

An even bigger disparity in distance was back in March when asteroid 70 Panopaea passed directly in front of spiral galaxy NGC 3344. 

That night asteroid 70 Panopaea was 17 light minutes from Earth while the spiral galaxy is more than 22 million light years from our Milky Way Galaxy.

In the coming weeks and month I will be looking for more interesting asteroid encounters and posting some of them here.