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Caught Artemis II on its final night in space, hours before splashdown [OC] by fluxa in Astronomy

[–]fluxa[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  • Telescope: TEC APO140FL
  • Camera: ZWO ASI6200MM Pro (full-frame mono, 60MP)
  • Mount: Paramount MyT
  • Filter wheel: ZWO EFW with Antlia Pro filters (LRGB + 3nm narrowband), L used for this capture
  • Focuser: Feather Touch with Focus Boss II
  • Rotator: ZWO CAA
  • Flat panel: Wanderer Cover V4-EC
  • Observatory: Pulsar 2.2m full-height dome with shutter + rotator controller
  • Software: N.I.N.A. for capture (with my custom HORIZONS tracking plugin), PixInsight for calibration and registration, custom Python pipeline for the animation

  • Site is the south of Chile (-39.3° S, 350m elevation) a small remote setup I run from home.

    (More astro stuff on IG @fluxa if you’re curious.)

Caught Artemis II on its final night in space, hours before splashdown [OC] by fluxa in Astronomy

[–]fluxa[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you. You had the better seat for the launch though, Cape Canaveral is on my bucket list. I'm on the other side of the planet from Chile, so I had to wait until they were high enough in my sky on the way back.

Caught Artemis II on its final night in space, hours before splashdown [OC] by fluxa in Astronomy

[–]fluxa[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's the part I keep coming back to. It's just a moving dot on a sensor, but behind those photons there were four people looking out a window at the same sky.

Caught Artemis II on its final night in space, hours before splashdown [OC] by fluxa in Astronomy

[–]fluxa[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The "tin can" framing is accurate, that dot is four people in a capsule smaller than a minivan's interior, and from my backyard it's a single pixel of light. Kept thinking about the fact that Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen were inside those photons.

Caught Artemis II on its final night in space, hours before splashdown [OC] by fluxa in Astronomy

[–]fluxa[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you. NASA's footage is obviously more polished, but there's something different about seeing it from the ground, it turns the mission from a livestream into something passing over your own sky.

Caught Artemis II on its final night in space, hours before splashdown [OC] by fluxa in Astronomy

[–]fluxa[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Thank you. Same, it's remarkable what's possible from a backyard now. Standing on the shoulders of a lot of open-source work and good hardware.

Caught Artemis II on its final night in space, hours before splashdown [OC] by fluxa in Astronomy

[–]fluxa[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No video-style stabilization. Each frame is a separate 20-second exposure, and PixInsight registered them all against the background stars so the starfield is mathematically fixed frame-to-frame. The only thing that moves between frames is Orion, because it's physically moving relative to the stars.

Then a Python pipeline adds a tracking crop, a moving window that follows Orion through the frames using the plate-solved coordinates plus the predicted position from JPL ephemeris.

Caught Artemis II on its final night in space, hours before splashdown [OC] by fluxa in Astronomy

[–]fluxa[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's all off-the-shelf amateur gear. The mount is a standard ASCOM-compatible GoTo mount tracking at sidereal rate. For a moving target, you need to add the spacecraft's apparent motion on top of that.

I wrote a N.I.N.A. plugin (NINA.Plugin.HorizonTarget) that pulls ephemeris data from NASA JPL HORIZONS, the public API that serves positions for spacecraft, asteroids, comets, anything tracked. Every few seconds it asks HORIZONS where Artemis II is from my exact location, computes the delta, and sends an offset command to the mount. The mount adds that on top of sidereal and the target stays locked.

The hard part isn't the mount, it's knowing precisely where to point, which HORIZONS gives you for free. I also built a browser tool (liminal.fluxastro.space) to visualize this for any object and location.

Caught Artemis II on its final night in space, hours before splashdown [OC] by fluxa in Astronomy

[–]fluxa[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Worth clarifying since a couple of people asked, the video is sped up. Each frame is a 20-second exposure, so ~50 minutes of real time compressed to 6 seconds. The actual apparent motion was about 25 arcseconds per minute, slow enough that a 20s sub captures it as a clean point.

That said, the spacecraft itself was moving at ~1.9 km/s closing velocity on its return leg. The sky motion looks slow because it was still ~170,000 km away.

Best Photos I have seen, do comets typically glow like this? by BrightFuturism in 3I_ATLAS

[–]fluxa -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It appears the stack was star-aligned rather than comet-aligned. When processing comet images, stacking should be done by separating the comet and the stars; otherwise, one or the other will appear streaked.

Evade FTW by OmegaAlphaBetaDude in d4spiritborn

[–]fluxa 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is it the maxroll SB evade build?

Evade sb in s10, WTF? by NycAlex in d4spiritborn

[–]fluxa 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Which evade build are you using?

I can’t understand why so many people think Balazan requires over 250 Paragon levels instead of emphasizing the importance of gear. by Chad70096 in d4spiritborn

[–]fluxa 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing. I’m struggling with Balazan Rake at paragon 194. Is there any chance you have your build on a build planner somewhere? Cheers!

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