Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster imaged again: 18 Feb. 2018
Since SpaceX launched the now very famous Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster, we have been the leaders worldwide covering this car while it is sinking into the outer space and slowly fading. Our latest images set a record both for the distance and the brightness of this artificial object.
The Tesla Roadster, imaged on 18 Feb. 2018
The image above comes from the average of ten, 300-seconds exposures, remotely taken with the 16″-f/3.75 Tenagra III (“Pearl”) robotic unit in Arizona, available as part of the partnership between the Virtual Telescope Project (Italy) and Tenagra Observatories (Arizona, USA).
The Tesla Roadster is now extremely faint and it is marked on the image with two red lines. The telescope tracked it apparent motion across the stars, this is way they look like little trails. At the imaging time, the car was about 3.5 millions of km from us, that is 9 the mean lunar distance. We measured the brightness of the car, which resulted in mag. 21.0, that is 40 millions times fainter than the Polaris star.
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