Capturing an image of the GAIA spacecraft

 The GAIA (Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics) spacecraft is a European Space Agency (ESA) instrument launched in 2013.  It employs the largest digital camera ever deployed in space (952 MP) and has mapped the positions of over two billion (10⁹) stars with unprecedented precision during its operational life.  Due to dwindling fuel supplies, the science mission was ended on 15 January.  The spacecraft is now undergoing testing and calibrating before it is sent into a graveyard orbit around the sun.

The GAIA spacecraft has resided in an orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, which is a semi-stable location on a line opposite the sun from earth, approximately 1.44 million km (899,000 mi) distant. The spacecraft is normally too faint to be seen from earth except by the largest telescopes.  During this decommissioning phase it has been reoriented with respect to the sun and the brightness is predicted to increase to around magnitude 15.  This is within range of amateur telescopes.

Under the dark sky in Creede I can routinely capture magnitude-15+ asteroids with a 135mm f/2 telephoto lens and 30–60 sec exposures.  That is more difficult with the brighter sky in urban Santa Fe, so this was a good opportunity to test the long-exposure capability of the 250-mm focal length Seestar S50.

GAIA's orbit has recently taken it within a few degrees of the star cluster M67 in the constellation Cancer. This was a good starting point for star hopping to the predicted spacecraft location.  The Seestar app currently has no way to directly enter celestial coordinates, so it was necessary to manually point the scope using the associated SkyAtlas app.

M67, the Golden Eye Cluster.  2 min.

I used a 15-min exposure to capture GAIA.  The centering is off because of the manual positioning and guessing, but it worked:  an image of a spacecraft nearly a million miles away!

GAIA is circled.  cropped from the original image.  11 pm MST 27 Jan.

Here is a finder chart showing the predicted position.  This was generated using the GAIA Ephemeris Service of the ESA.  This shows the expected position in 15-min intervals as seen from Albuquerque, which is the nearest predefined location.  Relative to these positions, there is a parallax of about 0.24 arcmin as seen from Santa Fe.  This finder chart represents just a small section of the above image.

This next image is a chart generated by Stellarium with the predicted position marked by the crossed circle (parallax not accounted for):

Finally, an expanded crop from the Seestar image (about 15 arcmin square) with some stars labeled with the magnitudes pulled from Stellarium.