Int.Space Station 23-06-2008

By far my best image of the International Space Station. I decided that I've gotten to the stage where I would always get the ISS in a fair number of frames each pass, so I thought I might stick my 2X barlow lens into the mix to see if I could increase image scale. Luckily, it payed off first try!

This pass occurred on Monday the 23-06-2008 with a maximum altitude of about 80 degrees. Visually, it was an amazing pass - it passed almost right in front of Mars, then passed Omega Centauri on the way out. Fantastic sight through the finderscope!

I'll explain how I've set the image out. The laptop I use to capture these images has a brighter screen than the one I use with the internet. So, an image that looks nice on one laptop looks dim on the other. So, the images on the left should be better suited for brighter monitors and the images on the right should be better for darker monitors. The top images are the original image scale from the AVI, and the bottom images were just doubled in size. In other words, these are all just the same image.

For capture I used my 10" Newtonian telescope on a Dobsonian mount - I hand tracked the ISS visually through my finderscope. The camera used was a DMK21AU04.AS with a 2X barlow lens. I did a tad bit of processing on this image by removing some of the grain around the edges.