http://spaceweather.com/THE ROADSTER AND THE STAR CLUSTER: Elon Musk's cherry red Tesla Roadster is doing things no electric car has ever done before. On Feb. 6th it left Earth onboard a Falcon Heavy Rocket. On Feb. 8th it crossed the orbit of the Moon. Yesterday, the Roadster paid a visit to a star cluster:
"I captured this series of photos from my cozy home office in New Jersey using a remote-controlled 0.5-meter telescope at the Chilescope observatory a few hours north of Santiago, Chile," says Michael Keith. "The Roadster was at a distance of 3.7 million km from Earth--a new record! Although it is was very dim (about magnitude 19.
I wanted to try to capture it because it was close in the sky to a nice globular star cluster: NGC 5694 is much farther away than the Tesla Roadster, alnost 115,000 light years from Earth."
Since NASA published orbital elements for the Roadster on Feb. 8th, amateur astronomers have been tracking the electric car, with groups leapfrogging over one another in an effort to capture the most distant photo of this unique spacecraft. Among photos submitted to Spaceweather.com, Keith's is the record holder. For reference, 3.7 million km is almost 10 times farther from Earth than the Moon. This record will surely fall as astrophotographers around the world continue tracking the interplanetary Roadster. Whether anyone can take a more beautiful photo than Keith did, however, remains unknown. Stay tuned.