Bereits im April habe ich die Artemis-II-Besatzungskapsel auf dem Weg zum Mond fotografiert (mit zusätzlichem JWST im L2-Halo-Orbit).

**Artemis II**

In April, I was able to image the **Orion crew capsule of Artemis II**, carrying four astronauts on their way to the Moon, photographed at a distance of around 326,000 km: https://i.imgur.com/EwOPdbr.gifv

That five-second GIF is a timelapse of about 58 minutes of observations with my 8″ diameter reflector telescope, as the Orion capsule moves against the background stars. If you look closely, especially towards the end, you’ll see that the path it’s traveling is not entirely straight. The curving of the path has nothing to do with maneuvering or orbital dynamics, and is instead almost entirely caused by the parallax effect of earth’s rotation moving my observation site 1200 km to the east during those 58 minutes of observations!

—

**JWST**

I also had the opportunity that morning to observe the **James Webb Space Telescope** in its halo orbit, at roughly four times the distance of the Moon: https://i.imgur.com/KOhlmOB.gifv

If you look closely, you’ll see the JWST flares up in brightness a couple times. These flares are caused by sunlight reflecting back at the Earth from various surfaces of the telescope when changing its relative orientation. During the 80-minute period I was watching it, the JWST had just completed NIRCAM observations of Europa and was slowly rotating itself to point at to its next target (spectroscopy of star HD-116852). Surprisingly, the entire slew/stabilize/guidestar process can take 30-50 minutes for the space telescope to complete before it’s ready to begin observations on its next target.

—

In the future, if you want to try pointing your own scope at JWST or the next Artemis mission, check out the [JPL Horizons page](https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/) to generate the ephemerides yourself! I was able to get the JWST observing schedule from [here](https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/observing-schedules). I also had an LLM make a script I could import into Stellarium to [plot the past/future Orion ephemerides (center of image) and the JWST ephemerides (upper right)](https://i.imgur.com/W8HEXYn.png) to make it easier to plan out when and where to point my telescope.

I estimated Orion to be about magnitude 15.0 during these observations.

**Equipment used:**

* 8″ Newtonian reflector telescope (1000mm focal length)
* EQ6-R Pro mount
* ASI ZWO 2600 mono astrocam
* Bottle of Stella Artois

**Software used:**

* NINA + PHD2
* JPL Horizons for Orion/JWST ephemeris data
* Claude Code to make some python scripts to automate some quick-and-dirty background subtraction and histrogram leveling, and to calculate and add timestamp text and distance text to each frame based on image filenames and JPL ephemerides. Worked surprisingly well…

this is actually so cool… im not totally sure how you even managed to capture that, but its just amazing to think about how far away it is :0