I was after some advice please on photographing the ISS. I have a Canon 7D and a 400 5.6 prime lens ( I do bird photography ) and was wondering what are the best settings to use . I tried last week , but I don't think the S/S was fast enough as I only got some blurred images.
Cheers Reverend.
Were you shooting Hand-held or tracking with a mount?
I haven't tried photographing the ISS but suspect it would be almost impossible hand-held. I think 400mm is probably going to be a little short too, but again I've never tried it.
There are a few people here that have done it so it might be worthwhile searching for those threads to see what equipment they used.
What are you expecting to see ? The ISS moves pretty quickly across the sky and is very reflective so although you will see some shape defintion possibly you are more likely just going to get a bright sky trail.
The few I have seen with some discernment of the ISS shape etc have been silhouetted against the moon as a backdrop or the sun through solar protected scopes.
Possibly a short high frame video avi file might do better as per planetary pix but the angle on the ISS would change quite rapidly so any detail would be blurred probably. 400mm should see it although it won't be large.
I've used a stationary camera/scope and held my finger on the (remote) button as it went past.
40D, ED127 (950mm fl), f/7.5, 1/1500, ISO800.
You can take those numbers and adjust to suit what you have. Good luck.
Hope that helps.
Brent's post has just reminded me of a few of the better ISS images I have seen here on IIS, were single frames pulled from video's.
From memory, one of the better ones was shot thru a hand tracked dob.
Great work Steve! Love the sequence!
As I had suspected, very, very small even at 950mm.
) and was wondering what are the best settings to use . I tried last week , but I don't think the S/S was fast enough as I only got some blurred images.
