ISS short film

[Ludd]

I took these frames from my back garden back in August and have only now got round to putting them together.  Shot on a Canon 1000D through a Celestron C8.

There's a bit of a jump in the middle where I had to flip the equatorial mount round.

[Andy_E]

That's great! love the sense of movement throughout the vid.

[Ludd]

And it's coming over London again in about 25 minutes, but I fear that it's not dark enough, there's too much cloud, and there's no way I'll get the scope set up in time.  Another pass at 8, but rather lower.

[steppenwolf]

Well done, this is not an easy task!

[LukeSkywatcher]

Love it. I dont know why i am so impressed with movies of the ISS. Its only a couple of hundred miles up. It must be down to the fact that it is moving so fast across our FOV and tracking it must be a nightmare. The only movie capture i have of it is with a small 10Mp point and shoot camera (hand held) and it just looks like a white point of light crossing the sky. 

Sorry, the DETAIL in this kind of movie is outstanding. That's what impresses me. Not forgetting the tracking.

[StuartJPP]

Very nicely done!

[happy-kat]

What magnification would that be please?

[Ludd]

Thanks for all the kind comments folks!

Hmmm, magnification doesn't really make much sense, to be honest, when you're taking photos and cropping them.

It was shot through a scope with a 2032mm native focal length onto the fairly small sensor of a consumer DSLR.  The camera was taking one shot every second for the four minutes or so that I tracked the ISS, and then when I went through the 240 or so shots I picked out 108 that had a half-decent version of the ISS on them.  I then cropped them all down to 720x540 pixels and used VirtualDub to convert the sequence of jpgs into a short video.  I then ran that avi video through the oddly named Castrator program which centres the image, at  which stage I was cropping down to a 144 pixel square. So that's a tiny little section of the original 3888x2592 pixels of the camera's sensor.

I suppose if you wanted this sort of view in an eyepiece, you'd be needing a magnification way beyond what most scopes could manage.  Into the thousands, I suspect.

[happy-kat]

Thank you :-) I guess I'm thinking about your starting magnification which is going to be greater then my scope.

Enjoyed your video.

[robbie c]

Great video ISS looks amazing thanks for posting couldn't have been easy to film  

[K3ny0n]

Champion!

Rob.

[Ludd]

thanks again - I'm hoping there'll be some more gaps in the clouds this week so i can have a go at catching some more footage.

[Ludd]

...and here's a pass from 29 June, sadly without the help of Castrator, as I couldn't get it to play nicely, so it's a but jumpy.  If I can get my manual tracking a bit smoother, I really fancy having a go at filming with a 1.2MP webcam (that I don't yet have)