There were intermittent clouds last night, but there were some long, clear spells.
Therefore, I had to try at least once to capture the Orion Capsule as it made its way to the Moon.
It wasn’t due to clear my neighbour’s house until the early hours.
I set up the mount in a part of the garden where I could catch it as it passed through this gap.
The southern meridian lies about halfway between the pole of the arial and the apex of the house on the left.
I grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep, then set the telescope up and focused everything, ready for it to emerge.
I got onto Beta Scorpii fairly quickly, as that was just above the roof of the house to the left of the aerial.
I got everything focused again and made my way slowly down as parts of Scorpius emerged.
Finally, the area of sky I was interested in was visible, so over I went and identified the field of view that NASA’s Horizon Web page sent me to. https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#
I managed to take four images before the sky got too bright.
Scanning the centre of the image, where it was meant to be, I saw nothing.
Then I noticed something moving right up against the left edge of the images.
I’ve heavily cropped the image to the area of interest and created an animation of three frames, posted below.
(It’s not the very tiny dots you can see moving).
I’m not 100% certain it is the Orion capsule, but I can’t find anything in that area that should be moving that fast.
It’s also moving northeasterly, as expected at that time (my images are upside down with north at the bottom).
Lessons learned with this one, but even if it is clear, I won’t get another chance at it now.
It’ll be moving directly below Antares tomorrow (5th April) morning, which only emerged from behind the house as the sky was too bright to image. Plus, the bright Moon will be closer to it.
