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Artemis 1, Niall MacNeill

Artemis 1

Artemis 1, Niall MacNeill

Artemis 1

Description

Warning you will need to see this in a darkened room.

At the risk of posting the most boring image ever posted on AstroBin, I do so for the historical significance of recording the motion of the Artemis 1 spacecraft. It will hopefully be the precursor to mankind's return to the Moon.

I went to the JPL website which has a nice application to calculate the Right Ascension and Declination coordinates, given one’s latitude, over a specified period of time.
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/
For me it generated a report for last night, giving me said coordinates over 5 minute intervals....see Revision C.
I set up a sequence in Sequence Generator Pro, where I inputted the RA and Dec position for the time I was imaging, programming 6 x 10 min captures. I plotted the position on The SkyX planetarium program and as you can see from the screen shot in Revision D, it was quite widely displaced from the Moon. It is marked by the yellow circle.
For a relatively long duration capture like this, the challenge was always going to be finding a guide star, with the Moon so close by. However, I was lucky and PHD2 Guiding found one. Whilst the guiding was not great it was good enough. You can see the glow from the Moon at upper right in Revision E.
Although extremely faint, I managed to locate the track of the spacecraft in each image. After registering the 6 images, it was clear to see that the tracks were aligned and thus not an artefact.
I had to do quite a bit of processing work, to firstly suppress the huge glow from the Moon, yet bring through the faint trace of the spacecraft’s movement.
The path is very faint. It starts out fairly much in the middle of the FOV, which is a testament to both the accuracy of the RA/ Dec coordinates prediction and also to SGPro’s ability to centre on said coordinates. You can then see that the track heads down and right and is broken into 6 segments representing the movement over 10 mins, with the gaps caused by the image download time. So overall this represents ~ 1 hour of the spacecraft’s path.
A good practise run for the manned flights to come.

Comments

Revisions

  • Final
    Artemis 1, Niall MacNeill
    Original
  • Artemis 1, Niall MacNeill
    C
  • Artemis 1, Niall MacNeill
    D
  • Artemis 1, Niall MacNeill
    E

C

Description: RA/ Dec coordinates for Artemis 1 from my location

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D

Description: The position of Artemis 1, relative to the Moon, on The SkyX planetarium graphic

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E

Description: The challenge of finding a guide star when near the full Moon. This is a screen shot of the PHD2 Guiding output.

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Histogram

Artemis 1, Niall MacNeill