A Chinese student studying at a Taipei university on Thursday last week photographed the separation of China’s Shenzhou-11 spacecraft with the Tiangong-2 space station, a photograph that was later published on Space Weather, an astronomical Web site.
Guangzhou native Tan Hanjie (譚瀚傑), an amateur astronomer and photographer, is a third-year student in the department of optoelectric physics at Chinese Culture University in Taipei.
Tan said the photograph was taken with a common single-lens reflex camera, which was still powerful enough to acquire a clear image of the trajectories in orbit of the spacecraft and the space station from his vantage point on the roof of the university’s Da Lun Building.
Tan said he waited two days on the rooftop to take the 20-second shot, which he then submitted to Space Weather.
On Sept. 15, the Tiangong-2 space station was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, followed by the launch of the Shenzhou-11 on Oct. 17. Two days later, the spacecraft docked with the space station, before it separated on Thursday last week, completing its month-long mission and returning to China.
Tan told Space Weather that the mission doubled China’s previous record for the amount of time its astronauts had spent in space.
A self-described “avid amateur astronomer” since childhood, Tan became the youngest member of the international Solar and Heliospheric Observatory project to find a comet when he was 13 years old, an achievement that was recognized by NASA.
Tan is a member of both the Society of Xingming Observatory — a privately owned and managed installation in Xinjiang, China — and the Astronomical Society of Taiwan.
In January, Tan added a previously unknown supernova to his growing list of astronomical discoveries.
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