In January, the Chang’e-4 lunar probe landed on dark side of the Moon but it's a tiny relay satellite that is getting all of the buzz today.
The Chinese Lunar satellite DSLWP-B (Longjiang-2) took a picture of Earth and the far side of Luna, the Dwingeloo telescope downloaded it, and now the public is enchanted. The tiny 20-inch satellite is used so ground control can communice with Chang’e-4 and the Dwingeloo telescope assists because communications signals go in a straight line, so they sometimes need to bounce to get to their target. Because of tidal locking by earth, the same side of our moon is always facing us and so prior to last year mankind had never visited the dark side of the moon.
As you probably know, amateurs - in that they are not being paid by governments, not that they are less qualified - are vital to astronomy and aerospace as well. They are our most successful citizen scientists. The transceiver on board Longjiang-2 allows radio amateurs to downlink telemetry and relay messages through a satellite as well as have it and downlink images.
So amateurs get credit for a lot of the color correction in these images, like this new one.
Want to see the originals? You can do that here. Happy gazing!
Below you can see an annotated picture with names of Moon craters by Tammo Jan Dijkema, an amateur who runs the
Dwingeloo telescope
with Cees Bassa, who wrote the article on the CAMRAS website.
Want to apply for time to work with the telescope yourself? See how here.
