kirkster501

Lovely ambient music by Joseph Beg.

Thanks for sharing Laurence.

There looks to be a tiny bit of blue here and there in the sky. I think it'd only need five or six 300s subs.

That is my understanding too. Should be easy to image it with a few five minute subs to show the movement. For visual I'd imagine you'd need a quite detailed atlas. JWST is not available on The SkyLive as yet Space Probes | TheSkyLive.com

Yep. Tower assembly has to raise up and the momentum flap deployed before the telescopic wings extend in a couple of days time.

This is the current location and will drift to the east a few minutes of arc per day over the next ten days. Would dearly loved to have imaged it but there is no chance with the weather - as per usual with anything remote exciting happening in the world of astronomy in the UK. You just run the Ephemeris tool to get the JWST coordinates for your location and then enter them into Stellarium. Remember parallax has a slight effect but less so now that it has been going for a bit and is 350k miles out.

Set the Ephemeris time to 10 days. 30 days does not work.

Without the pallets lowered there is no mission since the secondary can't deploy. Even if the sunshield doesn't work, there is still a [degraded] mission of sorts but the secondary \has\ to deploy.

That is a scary thought!

100% agree. It is frankly obscene the amount of money tied up in expensive imaging gear I have at home that I can hardly ever use. I have a friend - an old work buddy - who moved out to Spain and retired early, inland a bit from Malaga (for similar reasons, a hatred of the UK climate) and I have made overtures to him - which he is receptive to - of moving my imaging gear there. I will think about this in the coming year because the current situation of AP in the UK is hopeless.

My 12" Dob is always outside, 24x7, ready for the sky to clear.

At one stage, clear and dark skies were even a factor I was considering as part of my next house move. But I can't in all fairness justify it to my kids and fiancee that we live further away from civilisation and proximity to the things that they like to do based upon fifteen nights or less per year of clear skies - half of which the moon is shining down. So to answer the OP's question. No plans at all because it is impossible to make them in the UK. Bright eyed and full of enthusiasm I had a plan and a project to image the whole of M31 in very high resolution in HaLRGB. Five years into that project I have done four panels out of 16 and I have given up on it, autumn and winter have been incredibly dreadful for the last eight years or so.

Yes, I agree. Flogging a dead horse I think. I thought I might get at least one night of clear sky over xmas but nothing at all. I downloaded the ephemeris for JWST and hoped to get a few subs of it on its way out to L2. Endless cloud, mist and rain since December 10th has scuppered that and there looks no end in sight.

If the Webb telescope sunshield doesn't open, here’s what NASA will do (msn.com)

I thought the pallets for the sunshield were coming down at 2.7 days which would have been at about six this morning UK time. Hope there isn't an issue since we have gone past that.... Then again, they are probably doing due diligence so I remind myself that patience Grasshopper, patience...🤣

Where Is Webb? NASA/Webb

A lot to test and a lot to go wrong. They would have tested it within an inch of its life but at some point they have to commit. They said that even in tests, very occasionally the sunshield didn’t fully work. On the ground it was consuming millions of dollars per day too, even more when in Kourou. Fingers crossed for the next few days.

High gain antenna deployed. I think the big stuff starts tomorrow with the sun shield pallets starting to be dropped down.

Yes indeed. There are plenty of them that could still arise too. Without tempting fate though, yesterday was a major hurdle. Rockets can and do blow up on the launch pad as we all know. The earlier MCC burn was crucial too. Shows the fuel systems are working and pressurised. Some great pictures here: Newest! Webb in Kourou, French Guiana | Flickr

It's a shame there aren't more "webcam" style cameras on it so we can see what is going on. I am sure they considered it but I think JWST is complex enough without adding extra none-essential stuff like that on board.

Glad the critical first burn worked. That was crucial or else it wouldn't have made L2 - I read about that a few weeks ago.

Gosh, that was nerve wracking!!!!!

So far so good. Proper separation will be key 😱

Everyone in the family watching it...! I've got to take the turkey out, doh....

The number of software systems running at the moment in mission control, on JWST itself and in the Ariane must be incredible.