International Space Station (15/05/24)

[Kon]

International Space Station at 87 degrees from last night. This is possibly my best capture of 2024 with the 12". This is still manually tracked but I am setting up for autotracking that I hope to test this weekend. 12" Flextube Goto, asi462mm, IR pass filter, 2.5x televue powermate.

[Nik271]

Very detailed, Kon, well done!  I saw it passing overhead at dusk last evening and for a moment was tempted to try to follow it manually with my Skymax 127 but I just knew I wont be able to keep up with it. The Moon is much easier 🙂 

[mareman48]

Nice shot, manually as well, impressive.

[LukeTheNuke]

Wowsers, that's officially amazeballs. Well done! 

PS I zoomed in on one of the white background pixels and did a bit of deconvolution (Lucy-Richardson) and came up with this:

[Clarkey]

Great image once again. I agree with @Nik271, stationary targets are definitely my forte!

Auto tracking - now that will be impressive if you pull it off with the Dob. I assume you got your motor problem sorted?

[Kon]

4 hours ago, Nik271 said:

Very detailed, Kon, well done!  I saw it passing overhead at dusk last evening and for a moment was tempted to try to follow it manually with my Skymax 127 but I just knew I wont be able to keep up with it. The Moon is much easier 🙂 

Thanks Nik. I think you should give it a try. This week we have 2 passes every 1.5 hrs apart at night.

[Kon]

3 hours ago, LukeTheNuke said:

Wowsers, that's officially amazeballs. Well done! 

PS I zoomed in on one of the white background pixels and did a bit of deconvolution (Lucy-Richardson) and came up with this:

Thanks. I completely missed this 🤣

[Kon]

3 hours ago, Clarkey said:

Great image once again. I agree with @Nik271, stationary targets are definitely my forte!

Auto tracking - now that will be impressive if you pull it off with the Dob. I assume you got your motor problem sorted?

Thanks. I am very excited to try the auto track.

Yes motor is working fine now, although I still got one as a spare since they are hard to get hold of.

[bosun21]

Another excellent capture of the ISS. It's not the capturing itself, but the actual tracking that puts me off attempting this. How many frames did you capture Kostas? and how do you intend to try and track it? Your image does give me a lot of incentive though, showing what is possible.

[Kon]

6 hours ago, bosun21 said:

Another excellent capture of the ISS. It's not the capturing itself, but the actual tracking that puts me off attempting this. How many frames did you capture Kostas? and how do you intend to try and track it? Your image does give me a lot of incentive though, showing what is possible.

Thanks Ian. If you have a well aligned RACI it is pretty 'easy'.

For the auto tracking, skywatcher has a satellite app if you look at their website. A friend has been helping me to setup. I'll report here if I can make it work.

[Kon]

7 hours ago, bosun21 said:

Another excellent capture of the ISS. It's not the capturing itself, but the actual tracking that puts me off attempting this. How many frames did you capture Kostas? and how do you intend to try and track it? Your image does give me a lot of incentive though, showing what is possible.

I forgot to answer the frames. 5000 out of 6000 had it but only 40 were of good quality to stack together. I start capturing when it's around 75-80 degrees up. The seeing wasn't great last night even in IR. I focused on the moon and it was boiling.

[rrb24]

Fantastic! 👍

[dweller25]

Amazing @Kon, not long now before you can see what they are having for breakfast 🤣