Photo credit: Dwingeloo Radio Telescope
Chinese satellite Longjiang-2 is currently in lunar orbit and managed to snap a photo of both the far side of the Moon and Earth in a single shot. Longjiang-2 might have actually captured more incredible footage had its companion satellite, Longjiang-1, not gotten lost during its mission. Read more to see the non color corrected version of the photo.
Team effort: @bg2bhc created and planned all commands, @KuehnReinhard uplinked them to the satellite, the operators of the Dwingeloo telescope, today @cgbassa, @tammojan and @cosmicpudding, downloaded the results. Uncorrected image attached. More next week! pic.twitter.com/Eu4VmC1X7B
— Dwingeloo Telescoop (@radiotelescoop) February 4, 2019
“During the Chang’e-4 landing, the satellite was silent so that it wouldn’t interfere with communications between the Earth and the lander. But Longjiang-2 is active again. The probe started taking a time-lapse of the Earth-Moon system on February 3rd, and the first photo of that sequence was downloaded by the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory in the Netherlands yesterday,” according to The Verge.
