Places · Spaceport
Palmachim Airbase
The only site that launches westward, against the Earth's rotation, because everything east of it is a neighbouring country.
- Where
- Israel
- Coordinates
- 31.88°N 34.68°E
- Since
- 1988
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- space.gov.il
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 8 — inner city, Bortle 8–9, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 4.0–4.5. A few dozen stars, the Moon and the planets. The sky has a colour, and it is not black.
Against that sky 27 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 30 in a 130mm, with 5 reachable by eye alone. The nearest sky of Bortle 2 or better lies about 118 km north-west of here.
The Sun drops far enough below the horizon here for full astronomical darkness on every night of the year — which is not true of anywhere much further from the equator.
The centre of the galaxy reaches 29° at its highest, which puts the brightest part of the Milky Way clear of the horizon murk without ever being overhead. Of the 110 Messier objects, 4 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
The sky here is kindest to Ring Nebula, Triangulum Galaxy and Hercules Cluster, 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 and Cigar Galaxy never set from this latitude, so they are available on any clear night of the year rather than for one season of it.
Read at 31.88°N 34.68°E. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Palmachim Airbase?
Everything south of declination −58°. From 31.9°N that is a cap 32° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 7.5% of the whole celestial sphere. Nothing about the calendar or the aperture changes that — the cap is below the horizon at every hour of every night. Its mirror image, the same 7.5% around the north celestial pole, is circumpolar here and never goes down.
How many hours of true darkness does Palmachim Airbase get?
From about 6 hours 26 minutes at the thin end of the year, near 21 June, up to 11 hours 2 minutes around 21 December. The measure is astronomical darkness — the Sun a full eighteen degrees under — not simply the hours between sunset and sunrise. Unlike sites further from the equator, no part of the year here is written off entirely.
What orbits can be reached from Palmachim Airbase?
Anything inclined at 31.9° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 31.9°N arrives in an orbit inclined at 31.9° — 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 leaves the Space Station at 51.6° and the sun-synchronous band near 98° both within easy reach, since going steeper is only a matter of choosing a different heading. The bill arrives on the way down to the equator. Geostationary orbit is at 0°, so a satellite launched from here carries 31.9° 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 Palmachim Airbase from the other sites on this map?
BTA-6 is the nearest thing to it here — 1,440 km to the north. The nearest other spaceport is Baikonur Cosmodrome, 2,910 km to the north-east. These are straight-line distances over the surface, not driving distances, and in this part of the world the two can differ considerably.