79 Degree ISS Pass in Stunning Detail

Amazingly, today snowed for 5-6 hours but I was still able to get a clear night sky. All day it was grey skies with flurries, but right when the sun went down the clouds parted and I had a perfectly clear night for a nice high ISS pass.

Tonight the ISS hit an elevation of 79 degrees.. I’ve found if you want to see the most detail you really need 70 degrees or more, essentially it needs to go directly overhead so you can see the station broadside.

After months of practice I’ve finally dialed in the exposure settings for my 3x barlow lens, and tonight I nailed it. The pass was listed as a peak brightness of -3.9, so I chose an exposure time of 0.505ms and a gain of 400.

I got about 10,000 frames in my video but somehow I only ended up with about 200 frames that included the station. My pointing must have been pretty far off, but thankfully the shots that did have the station were astounding.

Both images were stacks of 5-10 frames which were sharpened with wavelets in Registax, and then brightened a bit in GIMP.

These are very nearly my best ISS images to date, at this point I think the only way to improve is to pray for better weather and more still air.

It’s hard to get the station exposed right with my planetary camera. I doesn’t seem to have enough dynamic range sometimes. Here the radiators are blown out, the body of the station is about perfect, and the solar panels are under exposed. Maybe some kind of filter would help.