Science
How to photograph (and see) this week’s lunar occultation of Jupiter
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There’s no denying that the occultation or close pass (depending on your location) event with the Moon and Jupiter on 17 May will be hard to observe, as it takes place during daylight hours.
However, given clear skies, Jupiter can definitely be seen in a blue sky, either using binoculars or through a telescope.
A good challenge is to go one further and try to photograph the planet.
In this guide we’ll show you how you can capture the close pass or – if you’re in the right location – the lunar occultation of Jupiter on 17 May.
What equipment to use
A daylight sky will greatly reduce contrast in the visible spectrum, but as long as you can locate Jupiter, switching to an infrared pass filter combined with an infrared-sensitive camera should make it possible to improve the view.
If you don’t have such equipment, don’t worry.
It’s still possible to get an unfiltered shot of the planet using a DSLR, but you may need to work a bit harder to separate its dim, low-contrast disc from the sky.
Find out more in our guide to DSLR astrophotography.
Finding the Moon during daylight
The event on 17 May will have the benefit of the Moon being nearby, but even this may be challenging.
With a waning crescent phase at 7% illumination, the Moon too will appear quite indistinct against the blue sky.
There are various ways to locate the Moon during daytime. The easiest is to catch it earlier as it rises in darker skies.
On 17 May 2023 this will happen around 04:30 BST (03:30 UT) from the centre of the UK.
Using a polar-aligned equatorial telescope mount, you’ll need to set the drive to its lunar rate, then centre the view on the Moon’s disc.
If you’re unsure about the precision of the polar alignment, you’ll need to schedule in periodic checks.
Another method is to estimate where the Moon will be at a set time and try to locate it that way.
At 11:24 BST (10:24 UT), the Moon will appear at an altitude around 47° due south.
This should give you enough information to get into the general area.
As ever, take great care when looking as the Sun will be up and relatively close by.
Observing from safely inside the shadow of a building so the Sun can’t be seen is a good strategy to keep safe.
Viewing the Sun with the naked eye is extremely dangerous, so care must be taken at all times.
Once you have managed to locate the Moon, Jupiter should be a lot easier to find.
Just be prepared for its disc to be extremely low in contrast, almost a ghost of its nighttime self.
Use the Moon as your focus target, taking care to focus as accurately as possible.
The sky can be bright, but don’t allow it to over-expose or you won’t be able to recover the planet.
Once taken, adjust the levels of the image using your favourite image-editing program (have a look at our list of the best free astronomy software), darkening the sky with the mid-point slider and tweaking to bring out weak Jupiter at its best.
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
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Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.
Slow Work
Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.
The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to re-insert that code into a new location.
Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond The ‘Heliopause’
The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of … [+]
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Pale Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back towards the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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