NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2025 Apr 10, 10:09 -0700
There happens to be a star in this image, which probably helps a good deal. See the attached contrast-stretched image.
Fiddling with Stellarium and watching the Ganymede-Europa-HIP 23561 asterism is one way to go about it. This ignores the potentially most rapidly-moving and valuable asset, though, namely Io (though unfortunately it might be close to its maximum elongation from Jupiter). A better way: fix a time t, calculate the locations of all bodies except Jupiter (which is too fuzzy and saturated to be useful), do a fit to the centroids of the image blobs leaving scale and rotation free. Do this for many times t over an interval. Pick the best.
Could they not have timed the launch to coincide with an occultation? Missed opportunity. :-)
Cheers,
Peter
