The International Space Station, ISS

I totally forgot that I’d had another got a photographing the International Space Station, ISS, as it flew overhead a few nights ago. The photos were not very good, so I headed outside to try and catch this evening’s very bright, overhead flypast and was a little more successful.

If it’s flying over where you live and it’s night time and the sky is clear, look to the western horizon for a steady, bright light that travels across the sky heading East, it will take several minutes to cross the sky, it moves quite quickly so hard to get a focus lock on with a big lens. There’s no twinkling, no flashing lights, just a very bright steady and steadfast light.

This was the best of a large sequence of photos I snapped where you can definitely see the shape of the beast and how it is rotating as it travels across the sky. Full-frame SLR with a 600mm zoom lens, EV turned down a few notches, ISO as low as I could go and get an exposure. f/5.6 but that’s irrelevant and a short shutterspeed to preclude shake while handholding the machine.

This is a 48×48 pixel crop from my original 5472×3648 photograph scaled up 4x and coupled with a NASA photo of the ISS so you can see better what it is you’re actually looking at here!

Below is a 768 pixelwidth crop of the original. The white speck in the middle is what I’ve cropped to in the view above