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Hi Mel,
I’ve looked at your YT video and haven’t been able to ID the field yet and have to rush off to work now. I’ll have another look when I get in tonight. To help confirm that you have got JWST I attach an image I took just at the start of your set (Jan 4 at 22:29). The trail of JWST is marked. The upper stage is around 3 magnitudes fainter than JWST and around 2.5 degrees west of it so your other object is not the upper stage. I can probably identify it if you let me have an accurate position.
You can get an accurate ephemeris of both JWST and the upper stage from here:
https://projectpluto.com/sat_eph.htm
This is based on amateur astrometry of both objects and is pretty well up to date.
Nice image David. As of tonight (Jan 2) with the sunshield fully deployed but not yet tensioned JWST was mag 14.5 at a range of 800,000km. When it gets to L2 it will be twice as far away (1.5 million km) so probably around mag 16 although this will strongly depend on the solar aspect angle. That is 4-5 magnitudes brighter than Gaia.
The Ariane upper stage was magnitude 17.4 tonight at 890,000km. At this rate it will drop below mag 20 in early February when its range exceeds 2.5 million km.
Grant, The upper stage was 16.5 last night. It will be passive now so optical astrometry is useful to determine where it is going. JWST will be injected into a halo orbit around L2 and will require periodic station keeping to keep it there. Since L2 is unstable the upper stage will move off into a heliocentric orbit with a period of around 380 days. Using astrometry from Peter Carson and myself I’ve integrated this forward and it is likely to return to the Earth’s vicinity in the summer of 2047 when it will be around mag 20 (see plot attached). The more accurately we can get astrometry as it departs the better we can predict where it will be in 2047 so surveys in 25 years time will know what it is.
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.
David – well done. Still no opportunities for me! It looks as if the complex deployment is going very well (https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/).
Denis managed to get another image of the spacecraft last night at around mag 14.5. I’ve had no luck since the weather has been cloudy here and all of the iTelescope systems that I have tried to use have had “roof closed” even when the all-sky camera showed clear sky.
The Horizons ephemeris is good for the spacecraft. There has been quite a bit of amateur astrometry of the upper stage and you can get an ephemeris of that from Bill Gray’s artsat ephemeris page here.
Denis Buczynski (Tarbatness) managed to get the spacecraft tonight at mag 12.3 which is a bit fainter than I expected. Luca Buzzi reports via MPML that the upper stage is around the same magnitude and about half a degree west of the spacecraft. There will probably be a significant effect on the magnitude when the sunshade gets deployed. Total washout here.
It was great to see the solar array deployment live via the upper stage camera. The launch certainly added some excitement to Christmas lunch and the Ariane 5 performed very well. Now, if only we could get a clear patch between the torrential rain…
Here is a revised chart for the current Dec 25 launch. You can see that it follows pretty much the same path, shifted around 4 minutes east a day.
Most likely you have a start time set before the launch time. The last line of all those error messages is:
No ephemeris for target “James Webb Space Telescope (spacecraft)” prior to A.D. 2021-DEC-25 12:48:00.0000 UT
Since the launch window opens at about the same solar time every day the chart should remain valid by just offsetting the dates, so, for instance, if it does go up on Christmas day then substitute 27.0 for 26.0 and so on. There will be an eastward drift of 4 mins a day in RA as well. In any case the JPL Horizons ephemeris will be updated to reflect the actual launch time.
It is very well placed for us and everyone but that is not entirely a coincidence. It is going in the anti-solar direction and the launch is scheduled to avoid getting too close to the Moon. Winter is definitely good for us in the northern hemisphere since L2 is currently high in the sky.
There’s not much detail available about what will happen to the cryogenic upper stage following JWST separation which occurs at around 30 minutes after launch. JWST is directly injected into a transfer orbit to L2 so the upper stage will probably be close by but it will probably do some form of deflection burn and JWST itself will do its first course correction at L+12.5h so the two will drift apart. There is another course correction burn scheduled for L+60h. I don’t know how bright the upper stage will be but on the first few nights I would expect it would be detectable and fairly close to the spacecraft. I’ve imaged Centaur upper stages at ranges of more than 700,000 km and the Falcon 9 upper stage at 400,000km but the Ariane upper stage is smaller I think. The Centaurs also do propellant dumps which can be interesting to watch. I assume that the Ariane stage does something similar.
Just for the record your attachment is a doctored version of the Time cover. The original is here. Whatever your views on Elon Musk you should have pointed that out. Twitter is not an ideal primary source for much.
Thanks all for the positive Sky Notes comments. I do appreciate having the opportunity to show some of the excellent work that our members do.
Oddly enough I am seldom referred to as a gentleman…
The JBAA is one of the few journals/periodicals that I continue to get as a physical thing. I’ve been a member of the BAA since 1974 and my run of Journals goes back getting on for 50 years (scary) but still only takes up a couple of metres of shelf space so storage isn’t really an issue. A bit like Jeremy I find that I don’t read digital copy in the same way as physical, its much more a quick scan then store it on the computer to look at another day. I tend to embrace new technology but reading for pleasure is still definitely physical books for me and I feel the same way about the Journal.
As Dominic says, you have access to the electronic Journal now so can try it and see how it works out.
Just search for SOLO on JPL Horizons. We’ll get a good view of it outbound on the evening of Nov 27.
That looks like a very nice setup. I couldn’t find it stated explicitly but I think your 60MP sensor is an IMX455. Combining the wide field of that system with automated plate solving and photometry would make it very powerful. Adding moving object detection and astrometry would be even better.
Are you using ACP for scheduling?
Hi Simon, It’s not an observing session but we do have a meeting coming up in Leeds next April. Hope to see you there.
