One More Try At ISS At My Max Zoom

Recently I had an ISS pass at 84 degrees elevation. That’s a prime pass, at a nice time of day, with clear weather. I was feeling optimistic so I decided to try my 5x barlow lens one more time. Recently it hasn’t worked out well for me, but it worked well for Jupiter so I figured why not try one more time. I put my shutter speed at 0.5ms to make sure I’m not blurring the image, and put the gain at ~500.

Manually aiming the telescope at this zoomed in is extremely difficult. This time I took 7700 frames and only 137 had the ISS in them, mostly fuzzy blobs near the horizon. I only had 2 vaguely usable frames from higher elevations.

I think this is some definitive proof that my 5x barlow just isn’t appropriate for the ISS. It’s simply too zoomed in for hand tracking, and my camera isn’t sensitive enough for such a fast shutter speed at that zoom. The image is very fuzzy, but you can absolutely see lots of structure in the ISS. This is an oddly successful failure!