International Space Station on a Nice Spring Evening

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to take my telescope out, but this week an ISS pass lined up nicely. It was a nice spring day with a nice clear sky and a 75 degree ISS pass in the evening.

The ISS brightness was -3.8, and from my notes I ended up using camera settings of 410 gain and 0.505ms shutter. There were some issues with the FireCapture software as the station was becoming visible, but it eventually behaved nicely. I used a smaller field of view in the software to allow for faster image capture.

After the whole pass was completed I had 19,000 frames but only 728 had the ISS in it. It’s not a great ratio, but I’m very zoomed in with a 3x barlow and with the smaller frame size. I looked through those images and found 7 different series of images that would be good for stacking.

Of those seven images one is clearly the best view, the others being good but slightly before or after the peak view.

Pointing at the ISS is a difficult task, so it’s not uncommon to miss a large portion of the pass so this time I was thrilled to see that I caught it through the whole peak.

In this image I love that the radiator panels aren’t overblown and the solar panels aren’t under exposed. The new solar panels are clearly visible on the left, the shape of the dragon capsule is even evident. I like the left hand side radiator panel because you can see a shadow laying across it but the lit and shadow sides are both nicely exposed to see details.

This image was made from the frames of the animation below.