This animation is a blinking of two 14-minute exposures of the Dawn
spacecraft from 600,000 miles from Earth. Bill Dillon, a regular advanced
user of Sierra Stars Observatory, used the Sierra Stars Observatory
telescope to image the Dawn spacecraft early in October, 2007. The
spacecraft was only 20th magnitude and moving fast. Dawn was in a fairly
crowded star field at the time, but, fortunately, the spacecraft was not
hidden behind stars.
The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by JPL, a division of the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. The University of California, Los Angeles, is
responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Other scientific partners
include Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.; Max Planck Institute
for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany; DLR Institute for
Planetary Research, Berlin; Italian National Institute for Astrophysics,
Rome; and the Italian Space Agency. Orbital Sciences Corporation of
Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.