ISS Over London

[Davide Simonetti]

A shot of the ISS as it flew over London last night. This is a huge improvement over the previous (and first) attempt last year but I think with a faster shutter speed it can be captured even better. 

Single 1000th of a second exposure at 6400 ISO with x2 Barlow (cropped).

[acr_astro]

Hi Davide,

nice snapshot! And definitely better than mine.

Achim

[stu640]

Wow, how do you capture it when it moves across the sky pretty quickly, with a single exposure? Do you lead it then stop and ambush snap it?

[Davide Simonetti]

Wow, how do you capture it when it moves across the sky pretty quickly, with a single exposure? Do you lead it then stop and ambush snap it?

This was done in rather haphazard way. Firstly the focus was attained using a Bhatinov mask on a star, then a smartphone app was used to work out where and when the ISS would appear. My scope is a Celestron NexStar 127 SLT on a AltAz mount which makes tracking fast-moving objects tricky but I use a homemade wedge to get polar alignments so this helped as the ISS flew directly overhead. Two of us took the shot...one to drive the scope using the spotter scope, and one to watch the camera view screen and take the shots. Although this shot is a single exposure, the camera was set to rapid fire mode (JPGs rather than RAW to avoid a bottleneck writing to the SD card) so about 200 shots were taken. Out of those shots about 40 had the ISS in them and out of those about 15 were reasonably good.

[stu640]

Blimey! This photography thing is getting more complex every time I look at it! Thanks for cluing me in!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Ruud]

Good! 

[Pete Presland]

Superbly captured!

[mshaid]

Wow awesome work

[JamesF]

Very  nicely done

James

[zedds]

Very nice! Got to have a go at this myself!!

[slim80]

Amazing capture well done

[The BFJ]

nice pic! you can really make out the modules of the ISS. well done!

[goodricke1]

Extremely impressive

[Magic2feet]

Nice [emoji1]