Hi Dale et al., Here's another story on it: http://sci.esa.int/gaia/53536-esa-pr-44-2013-liftoff-for-esas-billion-star-s... For those who might be interested, the Gaia spacecraft is visible from here in northern Utah as it makes it way to L2. Last I heard it was still around 10th magnitude so visible in medium sized telescopes. Now if the clouds would just get out of the way. I could not find it listed on JPL Horizons but here's where to get the ephemerides on a French site: http://gaiainthesky.obspm.fr/fov/ Salt Lake City is listed at 248, +040 As I enter this it's showing the craft to be at 05 43 45.00 +14 18 22.2 (0300 on the 21st UT). Anyone getting pictures of the craft before 15 January is encouraged to send them to jordan@ari.uni-heidelberg.de using the subject line "Gaia in the sky". The nicest images will be published by ESA as image of the week on the Gaia website http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/image-of-the-week (I got a kick out of the current image). patrick On 20 Dec 2013, at 17:29, Dale Hooper <dale.hooper@sdl.usu.edu> wrote:

I didn't see any mention of this so I thought I would forward this along. ESA's Gaia mission had a successful launch yesterday and is now on its way to L2. This is an extremely important mission. It will give refined astrometric data for up to a billion stars. This will finally let us really get good distance information for several Cepheid variables - such as Polaris so that these standard candles can be fine-tuned.

This is a great day for positional astronomy!

Here is a link below.

Clear skies, Dale.

http://www.universetoday.com/107357/esas-gaia-mission-launches-to-map-the-mi...