From FoxNews.com….
An Italian astrophysicist has captured the almost 100-foot Chinese rocket core that is expected to make an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere over the weekend.
Gianluca Masi, who runs the online Virtual Telescope Project, took a 0.5-second exposure photo of the fast-moving Long March 5B rocket from Italy using the “Elena” 17-inch Paramount robotic telescope.
“At the imaging time, the rocket stage was at about 700 km from our telescope, while the sun was just a few degrees below the horizon, so the sky was incredibly bright: these conditions made the imaging quite extreme, but our robotic telescope succeeded in capturing this huge debris,” Masi wrote in a release.
In addition, he noted the “typical CCD blooming effect” — when shooting a bright light source that appears as a halo or line defect — due to the extreme brightness of the debris.
Masi said he would attempt to photograph the core again.
