Places · Spaceport
Tanegashima Space Center
Often called the most beautiful launch site in the world, on a subtropical island where launches were once restricted to two short windows a year by a fishing agreement.
- Where
- Kagoshima, Japan
- Coordinates
- 30.40°N 130.97°E
- Since
- 1975
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- global.jaxa.jp
The sky from here
The sky over this spot is zone 2 — rural, Bortle 2–3, with a naked-eye limit around magnitude 6.7–7.5. The Milky Way is structured and obvious. Light domes sit low on the horizon over distant towns, and the rest of the sky is genuinely dark.
Against that sky 107 of the 110 Messier objects are straightforward in 10×50 binoculars and 107 in a 130mm, with 44 reachable by eye alone. There is nowhere darker worth driving to; this is already among the better skies on the planet.
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 31° 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 Triangulum Galaxy, Ring Nebula 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 30.40°N 130.97°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 Tanegashima Space Center?
Everything south of declination −60°. From 30.4°N that is a cap 30° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 6.9% of the whole celestial sphere. It is out of reach permanently rather than seasonally: no time of year and no instrument brings it above the horizon. The matching 6.9% around the north celestial pole is the same geometry inverted, and never sets.
How many hours of true darkness does Tanegashima Space Center get?
10 hours 57 minutes on the best night, around 21 December, falling to 6 hours 39 minutes around 21 June. That counts only proper astronomical night, with the Sun eighteen degrees down; the merely-dark hours either side of it are longer. Every night of the year gets there eventually, which is the quiet advantage of not being any further from the equator than this.
What orbits can be reached from Tanegashima Space Center?
Anything inclined at 30.4° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 30.4°N arrives in an orbit inclined at 30.4° — 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. The Space Station's 51.6°, and any polar or sun-synchronous orbit, are all available from here. What the latitude charges for is the other direction: a geostationary orbit sits at 0° inclination, and all 30.4° of the difference has to be bought back with propellant that could have been payload.
How far is Tanegashima Space Center from the other sites on this map?
The nearest is Uchinoura Space Center, about 95 km to the north. That is also the nearest other spaceport, with the next one 2,000 km beyond it. Measured as the great circle between coordinates, which is the shortest path across the surface and rarely the one you could travel.