Saturday 13 February 2016

Attempts at imaging an object at 17100mph

Here are my ISS images through my 8" SCT. The first was taken on January 17th at about 5:30 am. It was spooky watching for it as the shadowed station appeared on live view on the Heaven's above app on my phone. It appeared exactly on cue and I grabbed my telescope ready to move it by hand. I started recording and looked down the finder scope. I tried my best to position the scope so the bright spot exactly crossed the crosshairs. On looking at the video, however the shutter speed had been so fast (1/1500") it had skewed the image. For the second attempt, on the evening of February the 10th, I used 3ms (1/300"), and perhaps this was too slow as there was some blurring. It is a learning process, so next time I'll aim half way between and set the gain a little higher. The solar panels were pointing toward the sun and so were lit only faintly by the reflected light glancing off the earth, but they look brownish in the second image. The illumination angle was pointed out to me by Mike H from our society.

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