🔴 LIVE: NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched this morning at 7:26 a.m. EDT aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. We're running the launch replay — and then pointing the telescope at our own star, live.
Roman is on its way to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 930,000 miles out, carrying a 2.4-meter mirror and a roughly 300-megapixel infrared camera with a field of view more than 100 times larger than Hubble's. It's built to work on dark energy, dark matter, and a statistical census of exoplanets. Total mission cost is around $4.3 billion, and it flew roughly eight months ahead of its committed schedule.
Then we go live on the Sun. Active region AR4513 produced an M7 flare on August 25 — the strongest of that stretch — and there's been a good spread of spot groups across the disk this month. We'll look at sunspot structure, umbra and penumbra detail, granulation, and whatever the seeing lets us get away with on a hot Texas afternoon.
That turbulence you'll see on the limb, by the way, is the whole reason Roman is going a million miles from here.
What's covered
• Roman launch replay with commentary — liftoff, booster separation, fairing separation, spacecraft separation
• Where Roman goes next and what happens over the coming weeks en route to L2
• Live solar viewing from the observatory, with current SWPC active region data
• Q&A in chat throughout
⚠️ Solar safety: never point any telescope, binoculars, or camera at the Sun without proper certified solar filtration. Everything you see here is shot through appropriate filters. Please don't improvise this one.
Chapters
0:00 LIVE SUN — first look
0:0X Roman launched this morning
0:0X Launch replay: liftoff and separation
0:0X Where Roman goes next: the road to L2
0:0X LIVE SUN — active regions and sunspot detail
0:0X Q&A and wrap
Full pre-launch explainer on Roman's history, the NRO mirror, and the optics: [link]
#RomanSpaceTelescope #NASA #LiveSun #Solar #Astronomy #FalconHeavy #Sunspots #Astrophotography 
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