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I got images of the JWST

› Forums › General Discussion › Following JWST through Orion to L2 › I got images of the JWST

1 January 2022 at 8:36 am #585064
Nick James
Participant

I got images of the JWST spacecraft (2021-130A) and the Ariane upper stage (2021-130B) last night. They are currently around 2 degrees apart on the sky. JWST is much brighter tonight as the sunshield was being deployed. The magnitude was 14.3 at a range of 687,000 km. From the timings in the NASA blog I think that the sunshield was half out when this image was taken but this implies a magnitude of around 16 or so at L2. Astrometry of the upper stage is valuable since it is not being tracked by radio and I assume it is now passive.