ohhhh, this is good!
Using the 3.9m AAT, Sarah Caddy and Lee Spitler (from our school!) were able to track Orion on its return trajectory ...
... when the astronauts were still 200,000 km away from Earth! 🤯
That's at a distance of ~16 Earth diameters away, and Orion is a tiny tiny tiny spaceship at such great distances ....
But a big 3.9m telescope is also a handy toy to play with!
via AAL LinkedIn
The diameter of Earth is about 12,756 km.
You are thinking of the equatorial circumference which is about 40,075 km.
@CosmicRami oh, nice work! 👏👏👏
do you know if it was tracked manually or did they calculate a trajectory? 🤔
@spacelizard I'm everywhere! ha!
You have a BlueSky account to, right?
It's not too bad there, a bit more independent then Twitter. Hopefully it remains without its toxicity.
@CosmicRami No, no BlueSky account, though I have enabled bridging to BlueSky for this Mastodon account.
To keep my social media manageable I'm only active here and, to a lesser extent, Facebook these days.
@CosmicRami 5 meters over 200K km = 2.5e-8 radians, or 25 billionths of a radian (or 4 billionths of the circle). That's crazy!
1 billionth is 1/1,000,000,000
😱
CosmicRami
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