UT Apr 16, 2023: A movie of the JUICE spacecraft

Michael Richmond
Apr 16, 2023

On the night of Apr 15/16, 2023, under good conditions, I acquired a set of images of the JUICE spacecraft, which had launched just a day earlier. It was still close enough to the Earth to be bright enough for our 12-inch telescope to detect it.

These observations involved:

• Meade 12-inch telescope
• no focal reducer, so working at f/10
• ASI 6200MM CMOS camera
• clear filter, 30-second exposures
• images binned 4x4
• no guiding
• focus position in clear:
  • 0.427 yields FWHM 2.5 at T = 67/19

Notes from the night:

• I started well after dark, around 10:30 PM.
• maybe light cirrus, or maybe clear; I couldn't tell
• no Moon
• no skunks or other animals.
• air temperature was 67 F = 19 C. The camera couldn't cool to -20 C, so I set the temperature to -16 C.

The object was moving at about 0.08 arcseconds per second through the sky near

  RA = 12:10:05      Dec = -03:41:51       (J2000)

I took a series of 102 30-second images, covering a span of time about about 1.2 hours. One image from the set is shown below. The size of the chart is about 41 x 27 arcminutes; North is up and East to the left.

The bright star just below center is BD-02 3473.

I aligned all the images and created an animation showing the field over the course of about 80 minutes. At normal speed, the movie takes only five seconds or so, so you may want to slow down the playback.

• Click to watch movie