The ISS Is Always a Treat

It’s really hard to pass up any time there’s a high space station pass with good weather at a reasonable time. Tonight I had a 63 degree pass with clear skies, and most importantly it happened a half hour after my kids went to bed!

My planetary camera has a very sensitive exposure settings so I’ve tried to keep good notes on what gain setting worked best for different brightness levels. At this point I’ve dialed in the needed exposure settings pretty well, and I’m quite happy with tonight’s results.

I used my 8” dobsonian telescope, ZWO ASI290MC planetary camera, and 2x barlow lens. I made sure to collimate the telescope as best as possible beforehand, dialed in my focus with a bahtinov mask, and aligned my finder scope crosshairs. I used a gain of 380 and a shutter speed of 0.505ms.

I took a video of the entire pass, but after running the video through PIPP I got 1727 frames with the ISS present, though only a small portion of those are good frames at the peak of the pass.

The individual frames aren’t nearly as clear as they appear when you watch it as a video, but I’m very happy with how clear the video looks. Throughout the video I had a couple stretches of frames very close together in time so I was able to stack them together. After stacking in Autostakkert I was able to slightly sharpen each one in Registax with wavelet filters.

These combine nicely into a short GIF. Each individual frames is slightly sharper, but there are less frames than the video.

I’m very pleased with these results, though I’m hesitant to say they’re my best ISS shots to date. With a slightly higher pass and slightly better seeing and I would get a truly amazing ISS image. I think I’ve perfected my process, I just need all those little variables to line up nicely!