After launching the James Webb Space Telescope on 25 December 2021 I was curious if I could image it using a 10” F/5 Newtonian. Recently I consider capturing comets and this way I found an ‘Orbitals’ plugin for NINA which also offers capturing the JWST. I couldn’t believe that it’s so easy, after all, it stays 1,235,777 km from the Earth.
Together with my friend Alistair we collected nearly 3h of data in 30s subframes using my ASI 2600MC-Pro, IDAS LPS-P2 2” filter and of course, the 10” 1284mm F/5 Newtonian on top of Celestron CGX controlled by the NINA.
It was extremely confusing, a quick stack of 25 subs showed nothing apart from three bigger elliptical galaxies and a few tiny blobs. Stacking the whole set of subs also showed the same, of course with a better SNR. Then I realised that it should be possible to leave satellites' trails in the master file during the stacking and that was the point, the PixInsight allows it. The one disadvantage is that a typical stacking provides a smooth (even if noisy) picture while the second one leaves also a lot of artefacts which I had to remove using an Affinity Photo.
The following video proves that it’s the JWST and explains why its trail is curved.
https://youtu.be/6cUe4oMk69E?si=lwO7wv35CZnELf_TAnother video at least partly explains (or gives an idea how to explain) a change of colour in the curved part of the trail.
https://youtu.be/ybn8-_QV8Tg?si=qxCeTyMebppJsM_V* * *
https://theskylive.com/jwst-trackerhttps://youtu.be/suA8H-T6EZ0?si=hCSvPDHpwI7U6Trghttps://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?threads/any-way-to-turn-off-the-rejection-algorithm-in-wbpp.20866/
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