iceman
26-12-2007, 09:43 PM
We just had a magnificent ISS pass over Sydney/Central Coast/Newcastle area..
Mag -2.5, passing almost directly overhead. I had the camera on the EQ6 to take a widefield image, and the 12" on the dob base with the 2x barlow and DMK21AU04 to capture some up close images.
Man it was a hectic lead-up, a comedy of errors and trying to get the finderscope aligned in time, a test-shot on the 350D with noise-reduction on only just finished before the ISS cleared the trees (it was already almost overhead by the time it came into view), fired off the long-exposure, ran over to the dob to find it in the finderscope, started manually panning to keep it on the crosshairs, DOH forgot to press record in IC-Capture, start recording and spend about a minute trying to get the bright light in the crosshairs!
Out of the 5 minutes of pass, I only captured about 1 minute of it due to trees in the NW direction (where it came from) and the SE direction (where it headed to), so I only got the clear sky overhead.
But, I got some. Thanks to the 60fps of the DMK21AU04, it was able to capture a lot of frames (almost 3000) and there's definitely some ISS on them!
I haven't finished going through them all, or doing any post-processing, stacking etc. But here's one random frame I just found.
Man what a buzz!
We've got an even better pass (for me) tomorrow night (27th), and another like tonight on the 28th! It's gonna be a busy 3 nights if the skies stay clear!
Mag -2.5, passing almost directly overhead. I had the camera on the EQ6 to take a widefield image, and the 12" on the dob base with the 2x barlow and DMK21AU04 to capture some up close images.
Man it was a hectic lead-up, a comedy of errors and trying to get the finderscope aligned in time, a test-shot on the 350D with noise-reduction on only just finished before the ISS cleared the trees (it was already almost overhead by the time it came into view), fired off the long-exposure, ran over to the dob to find it in the finderscope, started manually panning to keep it on the crosshairs, DOH forgot to press record in IC-Capture, start recording and spend about a minute trying to get the bright light in the crosshairs!
Out of the 5 minutes of pass, I only captured about 1 minute of it due to trees in the NW direction (where it came from) and the SE direction (where it headed to), so I only got the clear sky overhead.
But, I got some. Thanks to the 60fps of the DMK21AU04, it was able to capture a lot of frames (almost 3000) and there's definitely some ISS on them!
I haven't finished going through them all, or doing any post-processing, stacking etc. But here's one random frame I just found.
Man what a buzz!
We've got an even better pass (for me) tomorrow night (27th), and another like tonight on the 28th! It's gonna be a busy 3 nights if the skies stay clear!