NavList:

This one is hard! When I first looked at this photo, I saw nothing familiar. It took me five minutes to spot two little triangles that solved it all. From there I realized there's one "official" navigation star in frame, plus one just out of frame and two others that are probably behind clouds or too close to the horizon.

See if you can figure it out without asking a robot (a robot would be a "plate-solving" tool like astrometry.net). Can you find the nav star? Which one is missing off the right side of the image? Any other "interesting" astronomical objects?

Two small hints:
There are no Milky Way star clouds visible because a certain astronomical point is near the center of the field of view. Also, there is a star famous in science fiction visible quite close to the rocket. That star turns up in science fiction, because it is a "sun-like" G-class main sequence star, and it is just shy of 12 lightyears away from the Earth. It's the sort of place you might like to visit when interstellar space flight becomes cheap.

The photo was taken by the skilled space flight photographer Ben Cooper. He posted the image today on Facebook. If you want to see it full-size, don't forget that the first view is a preview image. Click through that to see it larger.

Frank Reed

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