Clearest Shot of the ISS Yet!

Ever since buying my planetary camera I’ve noticed how sensitive the exposure levels are for the International Space Station. It’s very easy to over or under expose the ISS, so I’ve taken careful notes of my exposure settings each time I try so I can dial it in as best as I can.

Tonight it finally all seemed to come together.

I used my 8” dobsonian telescope with a 2x barlow lens and a ZWO ASI290MC camera set to black and white mode, 370 gain, and 0.505ms shutter speed. The pass was a 76 degree pass and the weather was beautifully cold and crisp. I set my focus with a bahtinov mask and made sure my collimation was as good as I could get. Once everything was as close to perfect as possible all that was left to do was actually hit record and track the station as best as possible.

This image blows away my previous best ISS shot, and I’m honestly stunned at the results. I love how you can see the gaps in the solar panels, and the twist in each panel. One big difference is my new computer has a solid state hard drive and is capable of taking 2-3x more frames than my previous camera. It’s much easier to catch those one or two brief magic frames when you’re taking more images!

This image was actually a stack of 10 images that I hand picked, removing any frames that looked slightly warped by my pointing or the atmosphere. Final sharpening was done using wavelet filters in Registax. I actually lost track of the station right as it reached it’s highest elevation in the sky, so theoretically I could have got an slightly sharper image, but I’m not going to be negative, this one as a major win!

Below is a short video showing all of the frames I captured. Out of 13000 total frames I had the ISS in 1300 of them, not too bad!