ISS Solar Transit with bonus SpaceX Dragon CRS-15 just before rendezvous

[sagramore]

Hi everyone. I've not posted in a long time and I hope this is the right subforum for it.

I have wanted to capture a solar or lunar ISS transit for about 3 years, since I found out it was possible. Thanks to the great website www.transit-finder.com I finally realised my dream yesterday morning.

Having stayed with a friend, I took my kit with me, set up the night before, and took the morning off work. At 08:53 BST I managed to capture the 1.2 second ISS transit of the sun and I was stoked. What I only found out earlier today (thanks to a user on Reddit) was that the SpaceX Dragon CRS-15 resupply ship was *just* behind the ISS and heading for rendezvous. With lots of extra processing I can actually see it following behind the ISS in my video!

I hope you like the results, I am really pleased with them. Thanks for looking!

Full frame (Photoshop colourised) GIF - Link in case the inserted version doesn't work: 

http://www.cavaye.com/stuff/astro/iss/Colour-Gif.gif

 

A single frame from the video ("natural" colour).

 

 

The individual frames with two processing techniques showing the transit path of the ISS. (Colourised in Photoshop)

 

Finally - a GIF heavily processed to help show up the (very faint) Dragon module:

Link in case the inserted image above doesn't work:

http://www.cavaye.com/stuff/astro/iss/Dragon-Gif-3.gif

 

Equipment details:

• Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro mount and tripod (controlled via Laptop)
• Skywatcher Skyliner 200P f/6 reflector (the dobsonian tube but mounted on tube rings for the EQ mount)
• Skywatcher 0.9x reducing coma corrector to give a final focal length of 1080 mm and f/5.4
• Canon 550D (T2i) crop-frame DSLR recording 1920x1080 video at 25 frames per second (unfortunately not RAW, I need to change this in the future!).

Processing details:

• Trimmed and converted the .MOV video output using Avidemux.
• Manually saved individual frames containing the ISS using Media Player Classic - Home Theatre (MPC-HT).
• Any shots that are colourised were done by modifying levels for each colour channel in Photoshop.
• GIFs were generated using Photoshop.
• For the "more processed" image showing each ISS frame I first took a 1 minute video (1500 frames) of just the sun alone and stacked the best 150 of these frames using Autostakkert!2. I then processed the resulting image in Registax 6 using Wavelets. Finally the individual frames containing the ISS were added to the image in Photoshop as layers and merged down using a "darken" layer type.

[xtreemchaos]

great catch mate. well done. clear skys, charl.

[Stu]

Very nicely done! Tricky job finding that dragon!

[DRT]

Wow!

Well worth a day off work  

[orion25]

Congratulations, mate! That's incredible!

Clear skies!
Reggie

[Ibbo!]

Great stuff

[Tonynexevo925]

 Very impressive ??

[Ewan]

Very cool well done that man ? 

[Pete Presland]

Fantastic capture!