Tiangong Space Station

Tonight I had an 85 degree pass on the Tiangong space station. I haven’t had much success recently with the space stations, I can’t tell if it’s just rotten luck with the atmosphere, or if I need to overhaul my telescope and give it a good cleaning.

My notes tell me that 0.5ms shutter speed and 415 gain setting on my ZWO ASI290MC camera should be a good exposure, but all my frames ended up a bit dark. I see the station, and some detail, but it’s barely there.

Tiangong is much smaller than the ISS so I should temper my expectations a bit, but I can see the solar panels, the main truss, and the living quarters. Comparing it to an in-orbit photo and it seems I caught all the main detail.

Usually such a high pass is a simpler imaging session because I’m almost solely moving in elevation and not much at all in azimuth, this leaves me with a pretty good sequence of images. Here’s an animation of the entire capture.