iceman
28-12-2007, 09:24 PM
We had another fantastic ISS pass tonight, a brilliant mag -2.4 at max altitude 68deg.
What made it more difficult was that it was at 8:33pm, still in twilight and the only other stellar object I could see was Sirius.
Luckily Sirius was there though, because it was all I had to use to align the finderscope and then focus the DMK with 2x barlow.
The mozzies were horrendous, but between slapping I did manage to capture another 3000-odd frames and got some ISS in them. I tried upping the gamma a bit this time to capture more of the faint detail, but used the same exposure (1/1250s). Maybe this orientation had more reflectivity, because there's more overexposed areas than my capture the other night. I'll try for an even faster shutter next time.
Anyway here's a couple of sample images.. i'm still working out the best way to process satellite images.. there's very few frames with sharp details and some of them only have half the ISS in the FOV.
Taken with the 12" newt on dob base, manually tracked through the finderscope, with the DMK21AU04 + 2x barlow. 1/1250s exposure @ 60fps.
What made it more difficult was that it was at 8:33pm, still in twilight and the only other stellar object I could see was Sirius.
Luckily Sirius was there though, because it was all I had to use to align the finderscope and then focus the DMK with 2x barlow.
The mozzies were horrendous, but between slapping I did manage to capture another 3000-odd frames and got some ISS in them. I tried upping the gamma a bit this time to capture more of the faint detail, but used the same exposure (1/1250s). Maybe this orientation had more reflectivity, because there's more overexposed areas than my capture the other night. I'll try for an even faster shutter next time.
Anyway here's a couple of sample images.. i'm still working out the best way to process satellite images.. there's very few frames with sharp details and some of them only have half the ISS in the FOV.
Taken with the 12" newt on dob base, manually tracked through the finderscope, with the DMK21AU04 + 2x barlow. 1/1250s exposure @ 60fps.