85 Degree Pass of the ISS
/When I look on Heavens-Above and see that I’ll have an 85 degree space station pass at 8pm it’s hard to say no. The kids are in bed, the weather is beautiful, and it’s peaceful outside.
The sky was clear but the seeing was forecast to be not great, which is what ended up happening. The picture I got is good, but not incredible.
Previous images were good, but I kept over exposing the body of the station, so this time I tried dialing back the camera gain slightly. I may have taken it a tad too far, but it’s all about experimenting with what gain settings is optimal.
Previously I’d used between 370 and 380, but this time I went all the way down to 350, while keeping exposure time set at 0.505ms. A gain of 355 or 360 would probably be the perfect balance for both solar panels and body of the station.
Nothing is really over exposed here which I’m excited about, though the bad seeing takes a bit of sharpness out of the image. Things aren’t as crisp as I’ve seen them before. Though I always love to see the checkerboard pattern of the radiator panels. This image was taken using my 8” dobsonian telescope, 2x barlow lens, and ZWO ASI290MC camera.
PIPP was used to throw away any frames without the station in view, and centered the frames that did have it in view. Autostakkert was used to stack 10-20 individual frames, and final sharpening was done with wavelet filters in registax.
