middy
29-07-2007, 10:17 PM
This event was two weeks in the planning. Brisbane had a favourable pass of the ISS tonight. What was even better was that it was going to be the same magnitude as Jupiter which meant I could get the exposure set correctly first by practicing on Jupiter, otherwise it would have just been pure guesswork.
One week before the event I made sure I gave my dear wife advance warning that tonight I would be heading outdoors at 6pm with the telescope to video the ISS. A followup reminder was issued yesterday too just to be sure :lol:
Armed with astrosouth's Toucam, the 8" Dob and a crummy old laptop running Windows 98, I set everything up in the back yard. I adjusted the exposure using Jupiter and then went in for dinner. When I came out just before the ISS was due to appear, can you believe that the sky had started filling up with wispy herringbone type clouds. :sadeyes: Luckily there was still a large enough gap where there needed to be and I was able to capture some decent frames. I actually think I overexposed it a little, but I was extremely happy that I managed to get anything at all.
Anyway, out of 2360 frames, approx 120 had something on them worth keeping. So here is the result of stacking about 20 of those images in Registax with a 2x Mitchell filter resize.
Also included is an animated gif with all the frames that had a visible ISS object in it. (Most of the frames anyway, I had to remove a few to get the filesize under 150 kB)
One week before the event I made sure I gave my dear wife advance warning that tonight I would be heading outdoors at 6pm with the telescope to video the ISS. A followup reminder was issued yesterday too just to be sure :lol:
Armed with astrosouth's Toucam, the 8" Dob and a crummy old laptop running Windows 98, I set everything up in the back yard. I adjusted the exposure using Jupiter and then went in for dinner. When I came out just before the ISS was due to appear, can you believe that the sky had started filling up with wispy herringbone type clouds. :sadeyes: Luckily there was still a large enough gap where there needed to be and I was able to capture some decent frames. I actually think I overexposed it a little, but I was extremely happy that I managed to get anything at all.
Anyway, out of 2360 frames, approx 120 had something on them worth keeping. So here is the result of stacking about 20 of those images in Registax with a 2x Mitchell filter resize.
Also included is an animated gif with all the frames that had a visible ISS object in it. (Most of the frames anyway, I had to remove a few to get the filesize under 150 kB)