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.
You captured some nice images considering it was still twilight.
I was out waiting for the ISS to rise aswell, although still in twilight I could only see Sirius (hardly). I got the Binos out and got a good short glimpse of the ISS. What a sight, i'm positive I saw the solar panels.
There will be another passing at around 10:20pm tonight but it will only be around 1.4 mag.
crikey mikey awesome detail.... couple of quick questions ... how big are the solar panels that you can see a lot of detail on ... and what is the altitude of the station
Great detail there Mike. I can't wait to give this a try if the sky ever clears up here. What proportion of the 3000 frames had a full image of the ISS?
Mike,
wel done,
that`s pretty cool stuff !
something you mention made me think:
"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"
Would it be possible to stack some images as per DSOs with mask as per M42 revealing the core? I guess it could be hard if the size of the ISS is different, orientation etc...
like I said, prety cool stuff and you can really se the structure really wel
cheers
frank
Lovely shot Mike and you've ot some great detail in the solar panels, it certainly was a great view last night as the ISS whizzed through the twilight.
I watched that pass last night too (from Toogoom Qld). It's been really cloudy up here with the impending cyclone (now downgraded) but it cleared in time to watch the ISS pass.
It was only 30deg alt here, but I thought I'd see what I could do with my 300m lens hand held on the E-510... no luck though, I can't find an image on the camera, so I'll have to wait till I get home and have a look an a computer monitor - I suspect my exposure must have been too low.
Another great ISS pass! (with another image!)
