[Matty P (Matt)]

Last night, I finally had an opportunity to image the International Space Station. This was the first time I had attempted to image the ISS so I was a little bit nervous but at the same time excited.

This ISS passing was a magnificent magnitude -2.3 reaching a maximum elevation of about 60° overhead.

On the dot of 8:56pm the ISS appeared through the trees. This was a very bright passing so I was a bit unsure of the right exposure settings to use. I went with a 1/900sec exposure time with the gain set at maximum with the DMK shooting at 60fps. I aligned the RDF the best I could earlier so I had the best chance of getting the ISS on the CCD chip. Out of about 12,000 frames , I captured only around 120 frames with the ISS on it.

WOW! What a rush. I did not realise how hard it was to image an object that moves very quickly through the sky. It sure was fun though.

I think for a first attempt, I did pretty well. The images were a little bit over exposed due to a bit of uncertainty. Even though the image is not that sharp, (probably due to bad focusing) I am very pleased with the results.

In the image posted, are all single frames unprocessed from the AVI.

P.S. I am going to try to make an animated GIF, I will post the results.

Thanks for looking and Enjoy!