An Unplanned ISS Capture, but Wow! - April 4th '16

[ArmyAirForce]

There I was, imaging Jupiter between the clouds, when a bright dot caught the corner of my eye. Crumbs!!! the International Space Station!!!! Quickly changing from Green to Lum filters, selecting full sensor ( but annoyingly forgetting to turn off the crop ), I released the EQ clutches, and peeping through the finder, tried to get the bright dot through the cross hairs in the finder.

Not having the sensor on crop to 180 pixels square would have helped, as I would have had 1280x960 pixels to catch the target on. However, the ISS was caught on about two dozen frames, mostly blurred, but four were pretty good. This is one of them. For an unplanned, rushed capture, with all the wrong settings, I'm pretty pleased!

I think I've identified the main components correctly, but as this is my first close up ISS capture, I could well be wrong!

The ISS was passing twice the following night, so I had a planned shoot, but poor seeing blurred any real details, though the transparency must have been better as the ISS was over exposed on the 5th using the same settings.

I was using a Skywatcher Explorer 200PDS, x2 TAL barlow and ASI120MM camera through a Luminance filter.

[laudropb]

Very good capture.

[Dave In Vermont]

Nice shot! I was out with my 12" LX200 one night, and that went across my FOV - unplanned! Nearly knocked me out of my boots!

Sneaky devil - that thing!

Dave