The Chinese Space Station

A long time ago I tried taking a photo of the newly launched first module of the Chinese space station. Being only a single module it only appeared in my camera as a a smudge, smudge, but since then they've built out much more of the station.

Tonight I had a 68 degree pass with a -2.0 brightness. I decided to set my exposure using my best ISS settings. The ISS is brighter, but it's also bigger. I figured one space station should be roughly as bright as another per pixel. So I tried 0.5ms shutter, 420 gain, and a 3x Barlow lens.

I caught the station but the exposure was a little low to see the solar panels.

I used a standard processing procedure: captured as an SER file in firecapture, broken into PNG files while throwing away empty frames with PIPP, stacking with autostakkert, and wavelet sharpening in registax.

I also cranked the color and brightness levels to try and see the solar panels. They're there, but only barely.

I love seeing the ISS, but it's nice to have another human spaceflight target in the night sky!