Welcome to Space, Artemis II!
For the first time since the early 1970s, humans are on their way to the moon. A partly cloudy sky over Cape Canaveral and Florida’s Space Coast provided a perfect backdrop for GOES-19 mesoscale imagery. Watch the True Color RGB imagery as the most powerful rocket that NASA has ever built shoots eastward across the Atlantic and towards its lunar destination.
The 3.9 micron channel, normally used for fires, can also be used to track the rocket in flight as long the solid rocket boosters and main engines are firing. This loop is the same time and area as the true color image above, but the rocket is shown as the large, rapidly moving dark (hot) spot.
This is also an interesting application for GOES CSPP Level 2 products. Here’s the cloud height product for shortly after launch. The plume is easily over 10000 m right after launch according to this algorithm.
On 6 April 2026, the astronauts will fly around the moon and be further from Earth than any humans have ever been.