High Pass of the ISS on a Nice Summer Evening

I’ve had a bit of a lull in terms of good ISS passes recently. I saw this 79 degree pass coming a few weeks in advance and thankfully the clouds held off, though only by a few minutes! The sky was clear but starting to get hazy, and by the time I was done the clouds really started rolling in.

Recently I’d had issues with my computer not recording images fast enough. I’d get 50 frames one second, and then nothing for 2-3 seconds. While this wouldn’t be an issue for planetary imaging, I need all the frames I can get for ISS. After some googling I found out how to increase the buffer size on FireCapture, and then I routinely got ~100 frames per second. I went from taking ~5000 total images with ~100 ISS frames, to 26000 images with nearly 2000 having the ISS in-frame.

With such a high frame rate I was able to stack about 40 shots together and really get a beautifully clear shot!

The solar panels were a bit dark so the image is noisy from trying to pull those out, but I think this is the first time I’ve been able to distinguish between individual modules so clearly! This shot was taken at 0.505ms shutter speed, gain 420 (for a brightness of -3.7) with a 3x barlow lens with my 10” dobsonian telescope.

I’m very excited to give this a try on the planets now that I can take so many more frames than before!