Light Flare Off The ISS Solar Panels

Weather foiled my plans for an 89 degree pass, but tonight I had a 53 degree pass. Usually I don’t bother with passes that low because at that point viewing starts getting a bit iffy, but it’s been a while since I took the telescope out and thought I’d give it a try.

The brightness was -3.8, and through previous experimentation with my camera and 3x barlow lens I chose 0.505ms exposure and 410 gain level. I took a video of the whole pass and let PIPP pick out the frames with the station in it. I also tried some video stabilization websites that seemed to work pretty well too.

Thankfully I had a pretty steady hand today so I had a lot of consecutive frames I was able to use for stacking. I was able to stack 20-30 frames. After wavelets I was impressed how clear the images turned out. In the second image a flare off the station solar panel is clearly visible. The flare is more noticeable in a video of the pass.

Planets are nice, but seeing the space station is truly magical.