A more successful tracking of ISS
Posted by Wesley on
ISS as seen from Naju in April 12, 2018
After several days of clear skies, clouds have been rolling in for the past two days. Amazingly, they did thin out for a few hours in the evening, enabling me to see the ISS for two consecutive days under good conditions. Tracked observation on April 11 failed due to low battery on the telescope, but I was better prepared on April 12 and made a successful tracking.
The International Space Station was 546km away from me at the closest approach at 19:38:03 (408km altitude, -3.6 mag brightness), so the second photo from the bottom right is representative of this. It is coincidentally the clearest photo I got. You can identify many of the modules - starting from the Zvezda module on the top and moving down, you can see the Zarya module in the center with two radiator panels side by side. On the bottom, you can see the cluster of Columbus-Harmony-Kibo modules in the center, with large solar panels on each end. The bright spot is likely where the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from the CRS-14 mission is currently docked at.
As I have captured several hundreds of frames, it was sufficient enough to arrange them into this 34-second video clip. I have hosted the file on the website, and it should be watchable on a modern browser.
Telescope: Celestron NexStar 6SE + X-Cel LX 9mm eyepiece
Device: iPhone X (afocal)
Settings: 28mm - ISO 400 - 1/1500s - f/1.8
Filters: None
Date/Time: 2018-04-12 19:37-19:38 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
Photos processed with PIPP 2.5.6 and RegiStax 6.1.0.8
