International Space Station Transit

International Space Station

 

Now for something a bit different!

This is a photograph of the night sky with the tail end of the transit of the International Space Station – this was taken at 19:20 BST, around 45 minutes after sunset – I only caught the end of the transit (so will have to try again!) – the transit was from right to left – you can see the track fades out, this is because the ISS is now longer reflecting the sun (i.e. too low in the sky) to this part of West Oxfordshire – in this instance traveling from SSW to E.

ISS information for transits that can be visible in your location can be found here at heavens-above.com or spotthestation.nasa.gov.

This photograph is made up of a composite of 3 shots each of 30s, stacked manually in Photoshop – apart from adjusting levels and boosting the colours slightly, nothing else was done.

Shooting at ISO 100 is far from ideal for astrophotography…next time I will have to make sure I have more time to prepare…it wasn’t until part way through that I realised I had forgotten to set the ISO – having time to do some test shots would have helped here!

 

Technical Details:

Nikon D80; 30s;f/5@18mm (18-70mm;f/3.5-4.5;Stock lens);ISO100 – Tripod – Post processing in LR5 and stacking in Photoshop CS5

 

3 thoughts on “International Space Station Transit

    • Ha ha – that will be a bit more tricky! My telescope doesn’t have any tracking capability…though if it did, would it be able to keep up…? This transit across the sky was 5 minutes…many are less…Sounds like a challenge! 🙂

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