ngc3031

This is likely not going to work without a guide scope. The ISS will be visible in the main camera for only a splitsecond. No matter wheter you give the start signal manually or automatically, this will probably result with the ISS being off screen. The ISS is visible in waves. For about 2-3 weeks in the evening, then a few weeks nothing, then 2-3 weeks in the morning. There are 2 periods in the year where it is visible in the evening and the morning. Check Heavens Above for your passes. That's why I added Alt/Az support 😀 But yes, lack of ASCOM is the bigger problem.

Hey guys, Developer of Satellite Chaser here. I’ve added support for Alt/Az mounts. I don’t have an Alt/Az mount, so this could be buggy, please give me feedback if you try my software. In case someone does try my software with an Alt/Az mount: Make sure that in the mount tab N and S correlate to Altitude movement and W and E correlate to Azimuth movement. Also do a test run as detailed in section 9.1 of the manual. In the guide and cockpit tab Ra is synonymous with Azimuth and Dec is synonymous with Altitude. Specifically to your homemade mount: It needs to support arbitrary MoveAxis commands to work with my software. I too have made my own mount, mine is equatorial, but it also works with a Raspberry pie and python. Nice to see someone else with a similar setup. A bit about how I calculate the position of the satellite in my software: I use the python library pyephem, the script is only about 30 lines. It takes time, TLE and Longitude/Latitude as Input and gives the Altitude, Azimuth, RA and DEC for a pass as output. Satellite Chaser then uses that info, takes the first derivative of the position data (which results in speed) and then feeds these speeds to the mount 10 times per second. Because it hasn’t been mentioned yet: The easiest way to get the newest TLEs is via celestrak: https://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/stations.txt

There you go:

As for exposure settings, take these with a grain of salt. I had to use very different exposure settings on my 750d (1/600 sec and gain 3200) to achieve similar results.

Had a very good ISS pass a few days ago. 200/1200 dobson ZWO ASI 290MC with a 2.5x Powermate (imaging camera) ZWO ASI 1600MM (guide camera) 400 gain 1.1 msec exposure Recorded at 160 fps The ZWO 1600 was attached to the finder scope of the dob. Combined with a tablet fixed to the telescope I could manually track the entire pass standing upright, looking at the tablet screen instead of through the finder scope. This allowed for much smoother tracking, escpecially towards the zenith. Out of roughly 80.000 frames 1300 contained the ISS. The gif consists of 70 images captured near the zenith. The frames are clearly overexposed, gonna have to reduce exposure time next time. Overall I'm quite happy with how this turned out.