A moonlit ISS conjunction, 4th July 2012

[StephenM]

Hi all,

There was a nice International Space Station pass yesterday morning, between the Pleiades-Jupiter-Venus-Hyades conjunction and Orion, and the nearly-full Moon was low in the west providing some nice foreground illumination, so I braved the cold and headed down to the local park to capture it.

Here's the results. The first image shows the scene before the ISS arrived, and the second (which is a stack of about 20x6 sec exposures) shows the ISS pass.

There's also a nice animation (5 megabytes) of the ISS pass here (http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8151/7500307342_44a2737512_o.gif)

Thanks for looking!

Cheers,
Stephen

[Dennis]

Hi Stephen

Lovely wide field images and a fantastic animation of the ISS. Thanks for the ISS heads up in my other post, I have found a frame taken at 5:37am with a trail in the bottom right at the same position as your image, so I’ll have a look at this later today.

Cheers

Dennis

[StephenM]

Thanks Dennis! Glad you like the animation! I think the moonlight illumination of the foreground gives a nice result.

Cheers,
Stephen

[Dennis]

Hi Stephen

Yes – the light of the near full Moon gives this a pleasing, natural HDR effect, something that even our anti-HDR guardian H, would have to admit to being quite nice and appropriate!;):lol:

Cheers

Dennis