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Wallops Flight Facility
NASA's sounding-rocket range and the departure point for Antares cargo runs to the station. Small enough that a launch is visible from most of the Delmarva peninsula.
The sky from here
Measured at these coordinates the sky is zone 4: suburban edge, which is Bortle 4–5 and a naked-eye limit of about magnitude 5.7–6.5. The Milky Way is a faint band overhead and gone lower down. The sky is noticeably grey rather than black.
Of the 110 Messier objects, 21 are an unaided-eye target from a sky this dark, 99 are comfortable in 10×50s and 100 in a 130mm reflector. You would have to get roughly 30 km east before the sky reaches Bortle 2.
Every night of the year reaches full astronomical darkness at this latitude; the Sun always gets its eighteen degrees below the horizon, which places much further from the equator cannot say.
The centre of the galaxy reaches 23° 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, 10 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
Hercules Cluster, Cat's Eye Galaxy and Andromeda Galaxy pass close to the zenith from this latitude — 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.
Pinwheel Galaxy, Owl Nebula 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.
Read at 37.94°N 75.47°W. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
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Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Wallops Flight Facility?
Everything south of declination −52°. From 37.9°N that is a cap 38° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 11% 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 Wallops Flight Facility get?
From about 5 hours 21 minutes at the thin end of the year, near 21 June, up to 11 hours 19 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 Wallops Flight Facility?
Anything inclined at 37.9° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 37.9°N arrives in an orbit inclined at 37.9° — 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. Shallower is where it gets expensive. Every one of the 37.9° between here and the 0° of a geostationary belt is paid for in a plane change, which is why equatorial pads are worth building even in inconvenient places.
How far is Wallops Flight Facility from the other sites on this map?
The nearest is Space Telescope Science Institute, about 184 km to the north-west. The nearest other spaceport is Kennedy Space Center — LC-39A, 1,140 km to the south-west. These are straight-line distances over the surface, not driving distances, and in this part of the world the two can differ considerably.