Artemis II Orion Capsule "Integrity"
On 1 April 2026, the Artemis II mission launched for a crewed trip around the Moon. I had heard that, in the Apollo missions, the spaceships were viewed and/or imaged from several ground-based telescopes, and I wanted to try it myself. The first task was to figure out where, exactly, the capsule would be. After figuring out that the "Integrity" would rise from my location around midnight, and after verifying that I might have some clear weather, I used the JPL Horizons database to generate an ephemeris of the right ascension/declination coordinates as seen from my location: I saved it as a CSV and imported it into a spreadsheet, where I used a table of predicted brightness values based on distance to figure out if it would *really* be visible: I also imported these coordinates into Stellarium so I could visualize their actual location in the sky at the various times. I did this by creating a Javascript script that I then pasted into the Stellarium script editor: The m...