10th December 2020

Vishal Sharma

On 10th of December 2020, there was a bright ISS Pass above my location. I was so excited & little bit nervous too, as I planned to capture it from limited space of my home balcony.

I have done all the setup & pre-focused my Celestron 127mm Maksutov on a bright star with the help of DIY Bahtinov Mask, just 15 minutes before the Passover timings.

And then at 18:17PM the moment came for which I was waiting from the whole day. After the ISS passover i opened the raw video without wasting any time with lots of excitement. I played the video and it was dark for few seconds, then suddenly a mega structure with flashing modules and solar panels came in the video. I jumped with excitement & said “yes I got it”. This was my best capturing till now with manual tracking & a very less aperture 127mm high focal length telescope & with a very basic planetary camera.

Some tips & tricks that I learned from my experiences with average Equipments i am using from heavily light Polluted urban skies:

1) Cool down Time: If you are using a Maksutov or SCT or any other compound telescope then place it outside at least half an hour or one hour before the ISS pass. This will minimize the blurry effect that sometimes came due to OTA internal turbulence.

2) For Manual tracking – Properly align finderscope with the main OTA.

3) Always Pre-Focus your telescope or camera. I normally use my own home made Bahtinov Mask to perfectly focus my telescope using a bright star.

4) Proper Camera setting: You should work on proper camera setting before any ISS pass. I generally keep my exposure level less than 1ms & Gian level approx 70-80 in SharpCap for my basic level ZWO ASI120 MC-S camera.

Details:

ISS pass above Noida Extension, 2020/12/10 at 18:17pm [Synthetic Color & Mono version]

Equipment Details: Celestron 127mm Maksutov, iOptron MiniTower Mount (Manually operated), ZWO ASI120 MC-S, ZWO IR/UV cut Filter

Captured via SharpCap, total 6 Frames stacked in AutoStakkert, minor enhancement in Snapseed.

 

8th December 2020

Alain Grycan

Toulouse
ISS, on 8th December 2020 at 18h24, culmination at 66°
C8, 1/1600s, 1600 ISO.

 

Tomo

Takahashi Mewlon-250 250mm F12 + Tele Vue Powermate 2x, Celestron Advanced VX (Japan Made Bearings installed in both RA and DEC), Manually tracked, ZWO ASI174MM

Location: Ama city, Aichi, Japan      Time: 2020.11.21 8:36:37 (GMT) 17:36:37 (JST)
Max elevation : 71deg.       Mag.: -3.6       Sun altitude: -10.9deg.

21st November 2020

Jonathan Grayson

Time: 5:38 PM Pacific Time    Location: Wheatland, California, USA   Gear: Celestron 1100 EdgeHD, CGEM DX, 2x Tele Vue barlow, ZWO ASI290MC

“This was my first successful shot of the Space Station, and to catch the visiting SpaceX Crew Dragon was a real treat!  I have attempted this numerous times in the past and it was always a huge failure.  The best image I had still looked like I’d tried to image a flying mosquito with my phone.  But nevermind those past errors, I’d given it some though and wanted to try new settings and a new tracking approach.

I had been planning this shot all week knowing that the ISS would be transiting my home at a high angle and brightness.  The day prior however, the forecast started calling for clouds which looked like it might ruin the opportunity.  But, as night approached, it the clouds turned out to be high altitude thin ones.  They were not idea, but the bright station was probably still going to be visible if the sky didn’t deteriorate more.

The pass happened shortly after sunset, so I was strapped for time getting the telescope focused and aligned properly before the station flew past.  I found a star, and got things squared away with just about 5 minutes to spare.  As soon as I saw the station, I hit record on my laptop and got myself ready to move the telescope around.  Once it cleared the trees (at around 75° high) I quickly started to reposition the telescope using my Telrad finder to try and keep the station centered.

The entire visible transit lasted about 5 minutes, but my imaging window was limited to about a minute due to the trees and my patio covering.  I ended up taking about 2.5 minutes of video having hit the record button early.

Afterwards, I rushed inside to watch the video and was a bit bummed to see that there didn’t appear to be anything there.  But when I ran it through PIPP, it extracted 7 frames showing the station!  I stacked those and edited them as I would any astro photo, and the result is what you can see here.”

Tomo

Takahashi Mewlon-250 250mm F12 + Tele Vue Powermate 2x, Celestron Advanced VX (Japan Made Bearings installed in both RA and DEC), Manually tracked, QHY174C camera

Location: Handa city, Aichi, Japan   Time: 2020.11.18 9:21:38(GMT) 18:21:38(JST)
Max elevation : 59deg.     Mag.: -3.6      Sun altitude: -19.8deg.

On the evening of 18th, I had to go to “Handa Celestial Science Museum” as a volunteer staff. So, I’ve brought my telescopes and set my gear at the parking lot of the museum. As It was partly cloudy, this shot was captured about 10sec before max elevation.

Mohamed Al Maazmi

18th November 2020

Astronomy Live

Filmed with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K @ f/20 (2x barlow) 1/500s @ ISO 25600

Michael Tzukran

 

17th November 2020

Aditya Joshi and Bhushan S Karmarkar

Around 300 still frames are captured using #Sonya7iii attached to #GSO 12″Dobsonian. First image is single frame, enhanced in #GIMP. Video is created in PIPP by processing individual frames.

Bhushan, Pune, India

 

 

 

Demo-2 mission

 

 

 

31st July 2020

Justin Davenport

I got a shot of ISS and Crew Dragon last night, at 10:35 pm Mountain from South Jordan, Utah. Taken with the C8/Canon T7i combo. 1/1000 exposure.

 

Mónika Landy-Gyebnár

Equipment: Nikon D5300, Tamron 150-600 + 2x extender  Settings: ISO 2500, f13, 1/1600 – 1/2000 sec. exp., handheld camera  Date/time: 31-07.2020 19:15 UT  Location: Veszprém, Hungary

17th July 2020

Szabolcs Nagy

International Space Station photographed from London. My third occasion to take photos of the second Crew Dragon spacecraft, nicely visible docked to the forward end of Harmony module. The top photo is made of the best consecutive 19 frames stacked and post-processed. The animation is a short cut out from a video I’ve made – some of the features marked on the ISS
Equipment: Skywatcher 250/1200 Flextube dobson telescope, Zwo ASI174MM camera, TeleVue 4x powermate, Baader IR-Pass, Bahtinov mask

14th July 2020

Josh Palmer

13rd July 2020

Péter Piros

2020-07-13 22:17 UTC (2020-07-14 00:17 CET) – Piliscsaba, Hungary Equipment: 300/ f4 Newton astrograph (Orion Optics primary mirror), Fornax 51 equatorial mount, ASI290MM camera, 2X barlow, TS crosshair eyepiece, manually tracked

Marty McGuire

 

12nd July 2020

Szabolcs Nagy

11th July 2020

Ricky Goodyear

7th July 2020

Szabolcs Nagy

International Space Station photographed from London. The second Crew Dragon spacecraft is nicely visible docked to the forward end of Harmony module. Note that also Canadarm 2 is visible on the animation – which I’m very happy too.
Equipment: Skywatcher 250/1200 Flextube dobson telescope, Zwo ASI224MC camera, TeleVue 2.5x powermate, Bahtinov mask

30th June 2020

Philip Smith

I imaged SpaceX Crew Dragon docked to ISS from my backyard Manorville NY USA 3:33am EST on 6-30-20 at Max 48°pass. Seeing was 3/5. I used an Edge HD 14″ telescope with an Astrodon Red filter on a ZWO ASI174MM (mono) camera and a Televue 1.8X barlow lens. ER Tracking software with modified EQ-G mount in and out.

29th June 2020

David Hash

All imagery taken with a Celestron EdgeHD 1100. The ISS+Endeavour photos were taken in color with a ZWO ASI290MC + ZWO IR/UV cut filter, and the older b&w image from February is with a ZWO ASI290MM + ZWO IR/UV cut.

24th June 2020

Mohammed Alabdulkareem

Equipment: Celestron C9.25+ 2X TV powermate. 10Micron GM1000 ZWO ASI174MM Location: Zulfi, Saudi Arabia Date/time: 24th June 2020 / 4:20am

22nd June 2020

Astronomy Live

Here’s my shot of DM-2 docked to ISS at sunrise. I tracked it using my open source software, though morning clouds confused the guide camera and the morning twilight kept me from locking onto the station until it hit about 30 degrees altitude over the horizon. This was my first time attempting to film a satellite with my Blackmagic camera, and the exposure speed ended up being slower than desired. You can still see the bright white DM-2 capsule docked to the forward PMA on ISS though. 6-22-2020 8″ Meade LX200 Classic @ f/20 (2x barlow) Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K, Florida, USA

10th June 2020

Anirudh S Thakar & Aditya Kinjawadekar

Now monsoon season in India, and hence the sky is almost always cloudy. But this evening there were intermittent low altitude clouds, and I felt the I could get at least some frames as it was too good a pass to be missed! Half an hour before the pass, it was drizzling a little bit, but the rain stopped. I quickly setup the scope, my friend, Aditya came over, and then suddenly, more clouds. Thunder and lightning! We thought this pass would be wasted. But at the minute of the pass (07.46 pm IST) the clouds thinned a little bit, and we could see the pass. So, we became satisfied! More so, when we learnt that the Dragon DM-2 is visible! All pictures were taken with the same equipment – 8 inch Dobsonian Telescope and ZWOASI120MC-S colour CMOS camera.

2nd June 2020

Josh Palmer

This image was taken with my CPC 1100 (Manually Tracked) and ASI224MC using FireCapture. It is a stack of 31 frames.

1st June 2020

Alexis Kwasinski

Two of my ISS images less than a minute apart from Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Captured using a CPC 925 with manual guiding, a 2.5x Barlow and an ASI224MC  camera. Taken at 8:22 UTC (4:22 US EDT=Local time).

Antonio Vilchez

Csaba Torma

SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission ‘Endeavour’ spacecraft shortly after launch over Romania Date: 30.05.2020 Location: Romania    Equipment: SkyWatcher 200/1200 newtonian telescope, Zwo Asi 224 camera

David Hash

Last night’s images were taken with a Celestron EdgeHD 1100 + ASI290MM at prime focus, through a Astronomik 742nm IR pass filter. Full frame FOV is 7 x 4 arcmin, although everything you’re seeing here is cropped. Auto-tracked using a Celestron CGX and some home-brew tracking code. 1 ms exposures, and camera rolling at about 150 fps. Captured with SharpCap, frames extracted with SER Player, cropped/centered in PIPP, stacked with AutoStakkert!3 (15-30% keep rate), wavelet sharpening in RegiStax 6, then final adjustments in Lightroom.

Marty McGuire

Steve Mack

8″ zhumell dobsonian with 2x barlow lens. ZWO ASI290MC camera set at 0.505ms shutter speed and 390 gain. About 4 frames stacked in autostakkert, and wavelets sharpening in registax. 01.06.2020

Demo-1 mission

7th March 2019

Szabolcs Nagy

Enlarged comparison photo of ISS with docked SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-1 (left) and the spacecraft after undocking – screenshot from the live feed (right) – Szabolcs Nagy