The Chandrayaan-3 and its booster imaged: 15 July 2023
Despite the clouds, we could image the Chandrayaan-3 and (likely) its booster, 15 hours after launch. Here it is our image.
The image above comes from a single 180-second exposure, remotely taken with the Celestron C14+Paramount ME+SBIG ST8-XME robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project in Manciano, Italy. The telescope tracked the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, so stars are leaving very long trails. Two objects moving at the same rates, are visible: likely, the brightest one is Chandrayaan-3, the fainter its booster.
At the imaging time, Chandrayaan-3 was at about 39.000 km from the telescopes. The spacecraft was launched about 15 hours earlier than this image was taken.
On July 16, starting at 00:00 UTC, we will show Chandrayaan-3 live, online.
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