[Utah-astronomy] Successful launch of Gaia yesterday

I didn't see any mention of this so I thought I would forward this along. ESA's Gaia mission had a successful launch yesterday and is now on its way to L2. This is an extremely important mission. It will give refined astrometric data for up to a billion stars. This will finally let us really get good distance information for several Cepheid variables - such as Polaris so that these standard candles can be fine-tuned. This is a great day for positional astronomy! Here is a link below. Clear skies, Dale. http://www.universetoday.com/107357/esas-gaia-mission-launches-to-map-the-mi...