Wesley's Tool-Box

After observing the ISS last year, I was waiting for some interesting changes on board the space station. And this came in the form of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft docking on June 6 as a part of the Crew Flight Test. This test was originally planned to last about a week, but thruster issues kept preventing its return to Earth. This meant that when I finally got the opportunity to make an observation in Daejeon after the monsoon season was over, I could photograph it with the ISS.

Weather in August was still unstable, and forecast for August 15 was cloudy with a chance of rain in many places. But outlook for Daejeon was clear, so drove my car there to make an attempt. And as forecasted, I could see the Sun onobstructed and was able to make a satisfactory observation, as you can see in the composite photo above. The docked Starliner is easily visible as a bump on the left-hand side of the space station's main modules. You can also see the large sunspot named AR3784 near the center of the Sun.

For those who are not familiar with the space station's structure, here's an enlarged photo showing where the Boeing Starliner is currently located within the space station. It's docked to the IDA-2 at Harmony module's forward port. SpaceX Dragon spacecrafts have docked at this location before, so some of my previous observations show that at the same spot instead.

Device: Nikon P1000
Settings: 3000mm - ISO 125 - 1/2000s - f/8
Filters: ICE N100000 (Neutral Density 16.5 Stop)
Time: 2024-08-15 14:20 KST
Location: Daejeon, Korea
17 photos processed with Pixelmator 3.6.6, RegiStax 6.1.0.8, and PIPP 2.5.9

I went to San Francisco to pick up my iPhone 15 Pro on the launch day, September 22, 2023. The primary advantages of this model over the previous ones are USB-C support and reduced weight. Unless you were getting a Pro Max version, the camera on the Pro series did not get much of a hardware improvement. So when I decided to do some comparison shots with the Harvest Moon photography during the Chuseok holidays, I chose some older models - iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro.

There were expectedly some notable quality differences between the three models. While iPhone 11 Pro does have a three-lens setup like the rest, the telephoto lens is only capable of 2x zoom. As a result, the size of the Moon in the photo was the smallest and least detailed. Both iPhone 13 Pro and 15 Pro have the 3x zoom lens on them, but for some reason the 15 Pro shot a consistently sharper image. Perhaps a slight hardware and software processing differences were at play. In the end, the latest was indeed the best.

Further details of the shooting sessions have been outlined in a separate video.