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ISS Lunar transit 28/5/2020


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I got inspired by Dylan O'Donnell and his guide to shooting lunar transits of the ISS, so I subscribed to calsky and waiting. On the 25th I got the notification that I was due a transit on the 28th. It was only due to skim the edge of the lunar disc, but I thought it was worth a try. I went back and watched his guide again and planned my evening. 

First was camera choice, the ASI1600 just doesn't give a reasonable frame rate, and it's mono, so I went back to my Canon 600D. Dylan's guide suggests an shutter speed of 1/1600th or faster to get blur free images, which ruled out video on the Canon, so I tested the number of shots and the speed of them shooting in continuous mode. 6 shots in ~1.5 seconds and then the buffer is full. I played with the idea of shooting in a lower res jpeg format to see if I could get more images in the buffer, trying to get the timings perfect was going to be a challenge otherwise. In the end I went with raw and the assumption that I'd probably not succeed on my first attempt, so I'd learn something if nothing else. 

The night before I went out with and set up including my laptop, normally I use Stellarmate on a raspberry pi, but this time I also needed the canon software running on windows to trigger the continuous mode shooting.

I found that in auto mode the camera was shooting ISO 6400 at 1/1600th of a frame to get the moon right, so I knew I was on the limits of the setup.

The night of the event I set alarms to get the setup done, "you should be done by now", final checks and a 1 minute alarm. I got the focus done as well I could see on the live preview of the camera and waiting. I wasn't able to PA as it wasn't dark enough, so I knew tracking would have to be tuned a couple of times in the run up.

As the 1 minute alarm sounded I had my finger on the trigger and stared intently at the seconds on the clock. At 22:11:14.5(ish) I pushed and held the button. 1.5s later I looked up at the moon and watched the station go by. Then I went back to see what I'd managed to capture.

I saw that there were some white pixels in the image, so I captured another 60 images of the moon to stack.

And here it is, the ISS right over the terminator. The ISS is totally over exposed, so there is something to improve for next time, but I'm quite happy for a first attempt, I was expecting to miss it completely.

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And because it appeared in all 6 shots, I put an animated gif together :)

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I've never tried to image the ISS let alone during a lunar transit.

I'd be literally over the moon if I had achieved what you have managed to capture. I think it is excellent! You should be well pleased with yourself.

Thanks for sharing.

Adrian

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1 hour ago, Adreneline said:

I've never tried to image the ISS let alone during a lunar transit.

In some ways I think it's easier, I knew exactly where it was going to be, all I had to do was track the moon, the timing was the only issue, without the moon I think it would be harder to get on target and you'd still have the timing issue. It's the only time I've ever attempted it :)

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On 31/05/2020 at 12:29, Endolf said:

In some ways I think it's easier, I knew exactly where it was going to be, all I had to do was track the moon, the timing was the only issue, without the moon I think it would be harder to get on target and you'd still have the timing issue. It's the only time I've ever attempted it :)

Never thought of it that way. I definitely need to have a go at this.  I have once seen the ISS through my 200p and was able to manually track it sort of. So much so that I could see the defined shape of it.   Getting a picture of it though would be excellent. 

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