A Night of Space Stations

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Tonight the space stations aligned, and both the ISS and Tianhe had very high passes at a reasonable hour!

First up was the ISS pass.

International Space Station

I checked Heavens-Above for the prediction and I had a 79 degree station pass tonight. I set up my telescope but I quickly realized there were no stars to use to align my finder scope. Thankfully with about 3 minutes before the pass I was able to pick up a star and get focused and collimated. I used a 2x barlow lens and my ZWO ASI290MC. My ISS settings have been pretty well dialed in, tonight I used 0.505ms shutter speed and 360 gain. The nice thing about the pass being slightly early was the sky wasn’t perfectly dark, so my finder scope cross hairs were nicely visible.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

It was a nice and clear night, but it seems like the seeing wasn’t perfect. My tracking was much better than usual so I had lots of frames to work with in stacking. Stacking in autostakkert and sharpening with wavelets in Registax ended up with a decent image. If the weather was better it would probably have been a great shot. Being on the early end of the evening it seems like the geometry of the solar panels wasn’t ideal.

Tianhe-1

Roughly an hour later the Tianhe-1 station went over head, reaching 81 degrees. Last time I took an image of Tianhe I saw the station itself but no solar panels. A plain cylinder makes for a somewhat bland image. A few days later I saw someone else online get an image with solar panels deployed, so I knew I had to try again.

I left my focus and collimation the same from the ISS, I didn’t want to change a thing. I also used the 2x barlow lens. My shutter speed was left the same at 0.505ms, but gain was 435. Again. I’m pretty proud of my tracking tonight so I had lots of images to stack.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

This image isn’t going to win any awards, but there’s definitely a station with solar panels! I’m excited to watch this one grow!