Finally Dialing In Exposure for the ISS

With my new 3x barlow lens I get amazing picture of Jupiter, and I’m hoping I’ll get similar improvement with the ISS. The problem is that my exposure will be different and I need to learn to dial it in again.

Over the last few months I’ve taken notes of my ISS attempts and I think I have a good exposure range now. I still use 0.505ms shutter, but a gain of 450 worked perfectly for the -3.4 brightness ISS. For brighter passes up to -3.9 I would probably go down to 400.

The pass was only 61 degrees high, which isn’t bad, but not great. The station is still seen mostly side on, so it’s kind of hard to see what you’re looking at. By the time the ISS got detailed the solar panels had faded from view, though the new solar panel is still seen very nicely on the bottom of the image.