Space Station With My New Planetary Camera

Recently I made the first big purchase for myself in a long time, a ZWO ASI290MC planetary camera. I've been imaging with a combination of mirrorless camera, webcam, and cell phone; each is good for a specific task but I was always slightly jealous of the Jupiter pictures people were getting with telescopes similar to mine.

This summer Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars will be in the sky and I figured this was a good time to take the plunge. At the moment there isn't much in the sky for me to photograph, but I love trying the space station. Tonight I had a 77 degree pass and a cloudless sky, though seeing wasn’t very good according to my forecast.

With no experience using this camera I'm simply guessing at the exposure settings. I first aimed at Venus to get a sense of brightness for something similarly bright and large as the space station. I ended up using 0.505ms shutter speed and a gain of 411.

A single raw frame ended up being my best image, though it's slightly over exposed.

The frames were aligned and cropped in PIPP, and sharpened with wavelet filters in registax.

The seeing actually was terrible, the forecast was right, so stacking wasn’t very successful. I was only able to stack 2-3 frames together before atmospheric effects ruined things. Only one short stack came out at all.

I'm ecstatic with these photos, they're better than all my previous images and I was guessing at settings. My sloppy first try is now my best ISS image, hopefully I can only get better from here!