ESA
Places · Spaceport
Andøya Spaceport
Sixty years of sounding rockets into the aurora from inside the Arctic Circle, now extended with pads for small orbital vehicles.
- Where
- Nordland, Norway
- Coordinates
- 69.29°N 16.02°E
- Since
- 1962
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- andoyaspace.no
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 5 — suburban, Bortle 5–6, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 5.2–6.0. The Milky Way is invisible or nearly so. Clouds are lit from below. You can read a newspaper outside on a clear night.
Against that sky 82 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 85 in a 130mm, with 15 reachable by eye alone. The nearest sky of Bortle 2 or better lies about 15 km north-west of here.
Between 29 March and 13 September the Sun never gets eighteen degrees below the horizon from this latitude, so there is no astronomical darkness at all for those 169 nights. Nothing faint is observable in that window, however far you drive from the nearest town.
The centre of the galaxy never rises here at all, which removes the brightest part of the Milky Way from the sky permanently. Of the 110 Messier objects, 35 never set from here and 22 never rise.
The sky here is kindest to Owl Nebula, Pinwheel Galaxy and Little Dumbbell, each of which passes within a few degrees of overhead — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Bode's Galaxy, Cigar Galaxy and Spindle Galaxy never set from this latitude, so they are available on any clear night of the year rather than for one season of it.
Against that, Trifid Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Southern Pinwheel never clear the horizon here at all. No amount of aperture or patience changes that; the only remedy is to travel.
Read at 69.29°N 16.02°E. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
In the news
ESA
ESA Space Transportation
ESA Space Transportation
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Andøya Spaceport?
Everything south of declination −21°. From 69.3°N that is a cap 69° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 32% of the whole celestial sphere. That part of the sky is not merely a winter object or a difficult one; it is geometrically unavailable from this latitude. The equivalent cap around the north celestial pole is the compensation, and it never sets.
How many hours of true darkness does Andøya Spaceport get?
Anything from 13 hours 30 minutes down to none whatsoever. Around 21 December the night is as long as it gets here, and around 29 March the sky simply never finishes darkening — a problem no amount of driving solves, because it is the Sun's depression angle and not the streetlights. Astronomical darkness is the Sun more than eighteen degrees below the horizon, which is a stricter thing than the Sun being down.
What orbits can be reached from Andøya Spaceport?
Anything inclined at 69.3° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 69.3°N arrives in an orbit inclined at 69.3° — the shallowest the site can reach without spending propellant to turn the plane — and steeper orbits are simply a matter of launching on a different heading. That is already steeper than the Space Station's own 51.6°, so even reaching the Station from here means a dogleg rather than the straightforward case it is closer to the equator. The bill arrives on the way down to the equator. Geostationary orbit is at 0°, so a satellite launched from here carries 69.3° of unwanted inclination that has to be removed in orbit, and the fuel to remove it is mass that is not the spacecraft.
How far is Andøya Spaceport from the other sites on this map?
Its closest neighbour on this map is Esrange Space Center, 258 km away to the south-east. That is also the nearest other spaceport, with the next one 1,220 km beyond it. Distances are great-circle, so they are what a signal covers rather than what a road does.