Polaris Dawn’s spacecraft captured in a record image, after the historic, first private spacewalk in orbit: 13 Sept. 2024
We succeeded capturing a truly record setting image: the Polaris Dawn’s Crew Dragon “Resilience” spacecraft orbiting the Earth, a few hours after the historic, first private spacewalk ever.
Polaris Dawn’s spacecraft: 13 Sept. 2024.
The image above comes from a single 1-second exposure, remotely taken with the ARTEC250+Paramount ME+C3Pro61000EC robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project facility in Manciano, Italy. The telescope tracked the “Resilience” Crew Dragon spacecraft of the Polaris Dawn mission while imaging it.
Capturing the spacecraft simply was an extreme task: it was moving very fast (0.2 degree/s) and extremely low (<6 degrees) above the North-Eastern horizon, under an 80% cloudy sky, while lightning all around. Five minutes after the image was captured, it started raining. An epic scenario for a record setting image.
Despite this, the 250mm unit part of our robotic facility succeeded imaging the target as a very sharp dot of light, about one minute after it left the Earth’s shadow. It was at about 1100 km from our telescopes and about 200km above the Earth surface, accordingly to the available orbital elements.
In the picture above, Polaris Dawn’s spacecraft is visible as a sharp dot of light on the bottom: the robotic telescope tracked the satellite, so stars look like long streaks; a few trees are visible on the bottom right, as the spacecraft was quickly approaching the horizon.
The sky quality at the observing site (Manciano, in the Tuscany Maremma, Italy, with the darkest skies on the Italian peninsula), helped significantly to succeed in this effort, with no light pollution interference.
The image above was captured about 16 hours after the historic, 1st private spacewalk in orbit.
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