Hi All,
While I am the first to admit that I haven't been at this astro game all that long, there have been some very memorable occurences that "stick in my mind".
The recent McNaught appearance, the Leonid "Storm" in 2001?, and others.
On the 30th May I watched the IIS transit across the face of the nearly full moon, and this is now etched into the memory as well.
To view these occurences you need to avail yourself of an alerting service, I used the Calsky service. It predicted the occurrence at 1751:51 NZDT, and accordingly Aaron and I set up the scope, and webcam to record it. As it was my first crack at this sort of thing the learning curve was substantial. The scope used, TSA102, and webcam wouldn't fit the whole lunar disk in, even with an AP67 focal reducer. So it was aim for the middle and
hope. I didn't know which side or direction it would pass either, so a fair bit of guesswork all round.
Aaron spotted the ISS coming from the southwest I guess about a minute before it passed, so the element of surprise wasn't there, as I had feared it would be. I was torn between watching in real time, or watching to see if I got the shot(s) on the computer monitor. I chose the monitor, and Aaron advised as it was about to touch. I actually saw it "scoot" across the disk, on the screen, amazing.
It was watched until it set in the ENE, and we reflected on this amazing site, how lucky were we.
I can't wait until the next one, and you can be sure I will be better prepared. Aaron produced a small animation and the link is here
http://www.totalwebsolutionz.co.nz/z...ontransit.html
The ISS is seen on the very left running from top to bottom. Nearly missed it, and while next time it will be better, I was happy to have just experienced it.
Gary BEAL
New Zealand
} and tracks satellites on its database, tired a practice run and it was pretty cool to watch, going for real it would be difficult to get a AVI with a toUcam FOV 
