ISS

[Kenny]

Ok, so, having seen Fay and John's first attempt I'm more than slightly embarrassed posting this but I don't care. This is my first attempt. It's much harder than it looks (and it already looked pretty hard before I attemped it!).

The ISS at 20:40 this evening from Orpington. Meade 8" LX90 with Celestron NexImage solar system imager (equivalent to 5mm eyepiece). Pre-focused on Jupiter and under-exposed for Jupiter (not quite enough). Clutches off, manually chasing the ISS in the finderscope.

Just under 5 minutes of video captured at 20fps. Total of 5,875 frames. Processed in PIPP ISS mode to find the ISS and discard the other frames. Only 7 frames contained the ISS and only one of those was close to usable (this one). Clearly over-exposed in places and possibly slightly out of focus. But I got it!! Chuffed to bits!

[JohnP]

Not bad Kenny, at least you managed to get it... Mark is definitely your man for ISS imaging technique.. He got some amazing images in the past. See here for starters:

http://forum.orpington-astronomy.org.uk/index.php?topic=3643.0

I seem to remember he does something like polar aligning his scope at right angles to where he knows the ISS is going to arc across the sky then he just has to loosen scope & move in dec to follow arc of ISS.... or something like that...

John

[Kenny]

Thanks John. I saw Mark's images in the gallery. They are fantastic. Extra hints and tips always welcome.

[Kenny]

p.s. It was incredibly difficult chasing it in two axis alt-az particularly as the ISS went directly overhead. Had to take the LX90 off track, swing round and find it again.

[Klitos]

It's a shame you couldn't photograph it when it was directly overhead as that's when it was at its nearest and would have looked bigger.