Wesley's Tool-Box

With clear skies yesterday evening, it was a perfect time to watch the International Space Station make a pass near zenith. Like last month, I set my P1000 camera to video mode while I tracked manually. When I reviewed the recording, I was happy to see that the frames were mostly in focus. The quality was actually one of the best I got with the camera, with most of the modules easily distinguishable. But then I noticed a faint dot next to the station in much of the frames, so I looked up the news.

It turned out that the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft was moving from one docking port to another during those moments. The move only took 39 minutes from undocking (19:31:02) to soft capture (20:10:12), so it was out of sheer coincidence and luck that I was recording while spacecraft was near, but not docked to the space station. The fact that the Crew Dragon's was just big enough to show up in the frames helped, too. The 109-meter ISS was 83 pixels wide at the closest approach, so the Dragon being 4 meters in diameter appeared as a 3-pixel dot. In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I photographed this occasion. It was something I had on my bucket list.

Device: Nikon P1000
Settings: 3000mm - ISO 200 - 1/1000s - f/8
Filters: None
Time: 2021-04-05 20:05:26-20:06:12 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
432 video frames processed with PIPP 2.5.9, RegiStax 6.1.0.8, and Pixelmator Pro 2.0

SpaceX Crew Dragon launched on May 30, 2020, under the mission name DM-2, became the first privately operated spacecraft to reach the Int'l Space Station with a human crew. It is now docked to the Harmony module at the forward end until around August, which makes it possible to be seen when the station is overhead. I made some attempts to photograph it, and these are the first clear results coming from the space station's transit in front of the Sun.

With a distance of 448.9 km, the station would have an angular diameter of 61.6", which made it easier to notice the docked spacecraft in question. You can clearly see the difference when you compare the new photos to the one I took 5 years ago, when another SpaceX spacecraft, the Cargo Dragon, was berthed to the bottom of the Harmony module (and thus not distinguishable from the overhead view) for the CRS-6 mission.

To take these photos, I drove to Hamyang on my Bolt EV. It was about 100 km away from home, but the weather was excellent and I didn't want to waste a good opportunity. I was glad that everything went right. The photo from 5 years ago is an enlarged composite of multiple frames took by an iPhone through a telescope. But it seems that a single photo taken by Nikon P1000 on its own surpasses that with proper focusing, even though the setup is much simpler and lighter. I guess I'll be bringing around the camera to more places.

Device: Nikon P1000
Settings: 3000mm - ISO 200 - 1/2500s - f/8
Filters: None
Time: 2019-06-22 13:53:20 KST
Location: Hamyang, Korea