Rosetta Spacecraft
Taken by Scott Ferguson on May 21, 2014 @
Siding Spring, Australia
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Details:
At 15:23 GMT today, the Rosetta spacecraft began a long 8 hour burn to prepare it to rendezvous with comet 67P later this year. Approximately 2 hours after the start of the burn, I used iTelescope.net's T17 telescope to attempt to photograph the Rosetta spacecraft.
I knew that was an extreme long-shot; normally the spacecraft should be far too dim to detect at 3.3 AUs distance, but I hoped that the expanding cloud of gas from the probe's engines might make it briefly observable during the burn.
Much to my suprise, after stacking a series of 3x5 minute exposures from T17 (using the clear filter for maximum sensitivity) I detected a small star-like object which does not appear to correspond to any background star in the Palomar Sky Survey images. This object is within a few arcseconds of the expected position of the probe according to JPL Horizons. The fact that it is a few arcseconds off makes me wonder if it is truly the spacecraft or not.
Given how far away it is and how slow its rate of apparent motion is from earth, there was not enough time during the imaging session to expect much detectable motion. I will attempt to confirm the detection by re-imaging the same region again at a later date with the same telescope and see if this star is still there or not.
Photographer's website:
http://flickr.com/astropics
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