Dealing with miserable weather

 

I was waiting for one clear night after many failures in the past few days. Particularly 26th September was very painful, did the setup in front of my block of flats, it was clear with gusty winds, but clear at least. I have seen the Cygnus cargo spacecraft flyby, but clouds were already rolling at an incredible pace. 10 minutes later when ISS was due, it started raining. I literally could not believe my eyes. Had to grab all my equipment as they were and drag them indoors, luckily no damage in equipment but could not believe what just happened. When I put back all my equipment to its place and stepped outside when HTV-8 was due it was totally clear. Very annoying evening…

The 27th September evening started the same way, clear but super windy and jet stream was even worse compared to a day previously. I knew ISS will be followed by the japanese HTV-8 cargo spacecraft due to be berthed the next day at some time. HTV-8 appeared about 2 mins after ISS and it was bright, between mag +1 and mag +2 I would recon.

 

International Space Station flyby forecast

 

 

HTV-8 cargo spacecraft flyby prediction

 

Image processing

 

This is a video about the story of this imaging session in general and how I processed the frames of International Space Station and HTV-8 cargo spacecraft. Instead of writing down what I already said in the video, I simply copied and pasted the video link here for your ease.

 

 

Final images

 

 

Skywatcher 250/1200 Flextube dobson telescope
Zwo ASI224MC camera
TeleVue 2.5x powermate
Eq platform

 

27/09/2019

 

(If you like this website and its content, please consider becoming a Patreon member)