ISS again - the 20.42 pass on 27 April

[Ludd]

I have a lot of work ahead of me, as I have 89 bmp files of the ISS taken with a DSLR when it went over just as the first stars were coming out, and then 93 seconds of AVI taken with a webcam.

Here's a sample shot with the DSLR: shorter exposures seem to make things crisper, but the image is still noisy.

[Psychobilly]

Oh yes love it... great detail I keep shooting widefield passes really need to try this sometime

[Ludd]

I've made a short sequence composed of shots taken two nights back, converted into bmp files, cropped using a little paper template and then dumped into Windows Moviemaker. I'm having some difficulty uploading but will persevere!

[Yidoboy]

Very, very impressive!!!

[Ludd]

Does this work?

issthingyfilm | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Well, it certainly gives an impression of the speed at which this blighter recedes in the eastern sky!

[caerus_sam]

Works perfectly Ludd.

Lovely view of the rotation. It's smashing seeing images in detail, but to see a video is something else.

[hayju01]

Great pics and avi.

Can you give more details on how you achieved this?

I had my 6" newt pointing at ISS on the 28th tracking was impossible only thing I got to see were stars and those were from knocking myself on the head with the tube

[hayju01]

justin

[Ludd]

My method is similar to EagleEye's although I've not yet managed the level of detail he has caught. I have a C8 on an old Vixen GP equatorial mount. On the back end of the scope is a low-profile Baader SCT to T2 adapter, onto which I attach a Canon 1000D with a T ring. Shortly before the ISS comes over I try to get focus on Polaris (because it moves very little I can focus at some leisure, although for this pass it was only dark enough to find Polaris about 5 minutes beforehand). I have not yet tried using a Bakhtinov mask to focus but I might have a go at that some time. For now, I have used live view at 10x to get focus.

Then, as the ISS appears in the west, I undo the clutches on the mount, set the camera off to take a shot every second. For this sequence I was shooting at 1/800 at 800ISO. With the camera clicking away, I then try to follow the ISS in the 8x50 finder scope. There's always a horrible meridian flip to do, just as the ISS is at its closest, biggest and brightest, but then plenty of time to get the tracking more accurate as the ISS heads into the eastern sky.

When it has gone, I can switch the camera off, wipe the sweat from my brow an head indoors. Out of the hundreds of frames there might be a few dozen with the ISS in them and not horribly blurred. The editing this time consisted of cropping in PS Elements with a paper template, rotating the frame before the meridian flip by 45 degrees so that the turning of the ISS is roughly constant, and then dropping into a Windows MovieMaker file and squeezing them together at 0.24 second intervals.

I am going to see if I can get better focus and maybe even try my luck with a 2.5x barlow some time.

[hayju01]

Thanks Ludd, great summary much appreciated.

[ykket]

thats so cool!

[ChrisR]

Brilliant!