Tiangong 1: a new image from our 29 March 2018 observations

The Tiangong 1 Chinese Space Station reentered last 2 April, around 00:16 UTC. Over the last few weeks, we had a lot of fun sharing our observing sessions with a large international audience. Now that we are back from that rush, we could work on this picture we captured on 29 March 2018, which we find nice!

The Tiangong 1 space station in front of the 16" robotic telescope ("Pearl") available at Tenagra Observatories - 29 Mar. 2018

The Tiangong 1 space station in front of the 16″ robotic telescope (“Pearl”) available at Tenagra Observatories – 29 Mar. 2018

The image above comes from a single 1-second exposure captured by the all-sky camera installed above the 16″ robotic telescope available at Tenagra Observatories.  It was obtained as part of the partnership between the Virtual Telescope Project and Tenagra Observatories.

The Tiangong 1 space station is visible as a sharp dot of light just in front of the telescope’s optical tube assembly. At that very moment, the telescope was tracking the space station, so stars are leaving trails.

The telescope was observing Tiangong 1 too, looking through the dome slit. Among other stars, Deneb (Alpha Cygni) and an hint of the Milky Way  are easy to see.

We did several images of this spacecraft, feel free to review them here.

Back to “Star Words” page

 

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