Rosetta flyby on 2005 March 4

On it's way to comet comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European spacecraft Rosetta approached the Earth again on March 4, 2004, about a year after it was started. The following videos of Rosetta moving across the sky were recorded with a Mintron 12V1C-EX B/W video camera on the 0.5m f/10 Cassegrain telescope of the Johannes Kepler Observatory in Linz, Austria (48° 17' 36.2" N, 14° 16' 06.1" E, 341m, WGS84). A 0.6x telecompressor was used, resulting in a field of view of 7.5' high and 5.5' wide. The vidoes have north up and east at left. A precise timestamp (Central European Time from DCF 77) is inserted at the bottom.

Although the time between the first and the last of these videos is less than three minutes, Rosetta's apparent speed increased significantly in that time: While Rosetta crosses the field in the video sequence in 3.1 seconds, it takes only 2.6 seconds to do so in the fourth sequence, indicating an acceleration of about +20% in the apparent speed of the spacecraft. During the same time, the distance of the spacecraft from the observer decreased by about 900 km, from 10.460 km for the first video to 9.570 km for the last.

More images of the flyby by many different observers can be seen at this site.

22:40:22 CET. SenseUp 6x (0.12 seconds integration time). 1630 kB AVI (XviD MPEG-4 Codec).

22:41:07 CET. SenseUp 6x (0.12 seconds integration time). 1630 kB AVI (XviD MPEG-4 Codec).

22:42:24 CET. SenseUp 2x (0.04 seconds integration time). 1422 kB AVI (XviD MPEG-4 Codec).

22:43:16 CET. SenseUp 2x (0.04 seconds integration time). 1365 kB AVI (XviD MPEG-4 Codec).