It's cleared up in Sydney and I can see the shadow creeping across the Moon! 🥳🌚🔭

💥Greater (partial) success for #amateurradio and #amsat satellite operators in dispute with AST Spacemobile over commercial use of the 430-440 MHz amateur radio band for TT&C! 💥 In its reference Attachment to the recent grant, dated August 29, 2025, the FCC imposes clear limits ⬇️

NOAA-15 was decommissioned today at 15:26 UTC, with its AVHRR/3 Instrument still in better state than the last 2 remaining on MetOp-B & C. It wouldn't be so disappointing if this wasn't done for the wrong reasons... Makes you wonder what happened to NOAA.

#skao2025 Federico Di Vruno on impact of satellites on #RadioAstronomy from intended emissions (strong enough to saturate receivers) & unintended electromagnetic radiation (originating from on satellite electronics). In future 🛰️ constellations could impact 25% of our observing time! 🔭📡🧪

New paper day! In 'Near-future rocket launches could slow ozone recovery', we show that scaling up use of launch vehicles 🚀 has a point where the healing of the ozone layer is affected 🧪🛰️ Open access, free to read & share

Here, strf was used by the UVSQSat-NG team : - at the beginning of the mission to optimize the preliminary TLEs so that the university could establish the most reliable communication possible, - for monitoring purposes since refined TLEs have become available... Thank you for the great work!

Unfortunately the surface of the Moon is also quite hard.

We lost HAKUTO-R M2 signal suddenly

We have lost signal of Hakuto-R M2 Resilience! We saw the signal and its Lunar reflection close to each other before LOS, indicating that it was very close to the surface when the signal disappeared. Space is hard!

We are now tracking the landing attempt of #Hakuto-R Mission 2 #Resilience. Check our livestream at www.youtube.com/live/C7-MQ2U...

On the occasion of the @unesco.org International Day of Light, we created a 'light painting' using the Dwingeloo Telescope by mounting a light bulb at the focus for half an hour. #lightday2025 @idlofficial.bsky.social

And Magritte fans 😀

Two days too late and perhaps only funny for those speaking Dutch. (H/T Gemma Janssen.)

Maybe the upper stage failure ended up tumbling the spacecraft fast enough to break it up?

Following up on @marcolangbroek.bsky.social 's post on the upcoming Venera capsule reentry, I've done a writeup describing my own analysis of this object, which I first got interested in a quarter century ago! planet4589.org/space/debris...

Time for some science again... We are finding new pulsars with CHIME by stacking data over multiple days to boost sensitivity. As always, a huge effort by multiple postdocs, students and programmers. arxiv.org/abs/2504.16293

After fixing this mistake, the frequency difference is on the order of 1 Hz. This is about 0.7 ppb, so it is within the accuracy that we could expect for the GPSDO at Bochum. So mystery solved!

Great work! This is why we put our IQ on the web :) One remark on why Dwingeloo is less sensitive: we have a relay in front of the first LNA, because Dwingeloo also transmits in experiments like this one. Apart from that, we may also need a better LNA.

The signal can be detected both in the Dwingeloo and Stockert 25 m radio telescopes, but the performance of Dwingeloo is poorer. The observed Doppler spread is on the order of ±0.75 Hz, which is a bit less than the spread model I made. Read more: destevez.net/2025/04/anal...

New blog post: Analysis of the CAMRAS Venus radar experiment. A deep dive into the Earth-Venus-Earth L-band radar experiment done in March by @radiotelescoop.bsky.social, Astropeiler Stockert, the Deep Space Exploration Society, and Open Research Institute. 🧵

Oh dear ... "Mr Eclipse" Fred Espenak just wrote this on a mailing list and on facebook.com/fred.espenak.... The eclipse scene has lost so many of its greatest in the last three years, Jay Pasachof, Serge Kouchmy, Glenn Schneider, and now its towering figure will leave us. :-(

A bit late, but here is some additional analysis of the Earth-Venus-Earth radar experiments with @radiotelescoop.bsky.social from March 22nd, 2025. It takes the 4 recordings at the Dwingeloo and Stockert telescopes and searches in Doppler frequency and Doppler rates for the radar reflections.

Just catching up on this excellent #RadioAstronomy work by ProAm group using the Dwingeloo Telescope. 🔭📡 They managed to fire a signal at Venus, and catch the reflection back on two antennas here on Earth! There is *lots* of nice working coming from this group! 👏👏👏 Blog + link to script below

Start of the occultation of the #Pleiades by the #Moon tonight. The Moon setting behind trees. @leonoor.bsky.social @johanklos.bsky.social @waddensky.nl

This video shows the Moon occulting several stars from the Pleiades star cluster (M45) earlier this evening. The 40 minute observing run is condensed into 40 seconds. The brightest star is Merope (23 Tau) at magnitude 4.2. Now to work through 20GB of timestamped images to extract occultation times.

Some how I completely missed the fact that the Moon was going to occult several of the stars in the Pleiades. I managed to quickly put together a CMOS camera and a 300mm lens to capture the motion of the Moon across these stars at 10fps. Here's the occultation of the 8th magnitude star HD23361.

Hier is een (niet-versnelde) video waarin Electra, één van de helderste sterren van de #Plejaden, in een fractie van een seconde achter de #Maan verdwijnt (merci, @frankdeboosere.bsky.social, om hier de aandacht op te vestigen!).

Certainly an interesting description of the NROL-69 payload... So we expect this satellite to maneuver, possibly lots.... source: www.nro.gov/Portals/135/...

Successful Earth-Venus-Earth Amateur Communications: https://openresearchins.micro.blog/2025/03/24/successful-earthvenusearth-amateur-communications.html

This was quite the project to have been involved in (if only minor). Thanks to @telkamp.eu and other volunteers at @radiotelescoop.bsky.social for doing the heavy lifting to make this extremely cool experiment possible!

Given we now now it was slipping across the moon sideways this is telling.

Something like this? :)

No time to be fancy with GIOVE-A, had to grab the frequency and see how stable those RAFS where and sniff around to see the radiation environment in MEO, all accomplished and then some :)

Poor thing, it landed, but fell, and without enough sunlight in this location on the Moon to recharge it batteries... Sweet dreams and thanks for the pictures... I wish them good luck for IM-3 source: www.intuitivemachines.com/im-2 #IM2

It has been suggested by my CfA colleagues Loeb and Cloete that asteroid 2005 VL1 is actually the space probe Venera-2. Others have already pointed out that this is not the case. Here I give my own analysis to confirm that 2005 VL1 is not a good fit to Venera-2 : planet4589.org/space/papers...

It appears @Int_Machines IM-2 landed on time and largely to the trajectory they planned. @eelkevisser.bsky.social @amsat-dl.org

What a bizarre situation ... they have abruptly ABORTED THE WEBCAST of the #Athena landing although it is clear that the lander made it to the surface - they are COMMUNICATING with it - in one piece. But its status and even its orientation seem to be pretty unclear: scicomm.xyz/@cosmos4u/11...

yes, here is for example ExoMars as seen from ESOC, and "my own" first baby GIOVE-A it is the most basic, direct way to know.

Link Budget for EVE: https://openresearchins.micro.blog/2025/03/06/link-budget-for-eve.html

As everyone else, we are curious about the status of @intuitivemachines.bsky.social's #IM2 Moon lander. The raw data which we recorded during our livestream is available at data.camras.nl/im2/ , we will put more data there as we extract it from the raw recordings.

For the second time this week, the @radiotelescoop.bsky.social had a front row seat on a lunar landing attempt. This time by @intuitivemachines.bsky.social #IM-2 lunar lander. We listed to Doppler effect on the S-band signals at 2210.6MHz during its successful descent to the lunar surface.

New blog post: BGM-1 Doppler during the lunar landing. Some quick plots of the Doppler of @firefly-aerospace.bsky.social's lander as received by the @amsat-dl.org and @radiotelescoop.bsky.social groundstations.

I have a live stream of Blue Ghost on the Moon running. www.youtube.com/watch?v=haA7...

With the #BGM-1 lander from @firefly-aerospace.bsky.social now safely on the surface of the Moon, we've had some time to take a closer look at the @radiotelescoop.bsky.social's observation of the #BGM-1 signal during the landing, which shows several events during the landing sequence.

And one final image from Blue Ghost on the surface of the Moon at the end of the presser #BGM1