The ISS Crossing In Front of a Nearly Full Moon

For years I’ve been waiting for the space station to cross in front of the moon as seen from my backyard. In about 5 years it’s only happened 3 times, and the clouds have won all 3. I recently checked https://transit-finder.com/ again and saw a close pass on a nearly full moon and decided to see how far away I’d have to go to catch it. At first I thought my friend’s backyard would work but the predictions changed and I had to go slightly further. In the end I drove about 15 minutes to a grocery store parking lot the town over, not too bad!

The predictions turned out to be dead on, I saw the station cross my field of view within a second or two of when I expected, and it was slightly more to the side of the frame than I expected but still well within my capture.

I took black and white video because it saves to disk faster than color (115 frames per second compared to 75). I used 0.505ms shutter speed (same I use for normal ISS shots) and a gain of 150 to expose the moon correctly.

I was actually pretty shocked to see it go by on the screen, I wasn’t sure I’d even see it by eye and thought I might have to record a really long time to be sure I caught it.

I really wanted to try and sharpen up the station, but I’ve never stacked a silhouette of the station before, especially with a non-black background. In the end I had to individually crop each ISS to 200x200 pixels surrounding the station itself to do my best to ignore the confusing background. From there Autostakkert was able to stack about 10-15 images. After sharpening with wavelets in Registax I needed some photoshop work to make it fit nicely back in the image. Working with transparency was hard to not make it look like an ISS shaped stamp, or fall really in the uncanny valley. In the end I think I got one I’m happy with.

Here’s the sharpened shot next to the Apollo 11 landing site:

It’s very hard to put these images into size perspective, so I ended up making a photo montage to create the entire moon, and then I manually added the ISS back in.