Josef “Jeff” Sipek

International Space Station flyover

Few days ago, I decided that it would be fun to try to take a photo of the Internation Space Station (ISS) flying over. I marked my calendar to go outside today for the 18:16-18:22 pass over NYC-area. I used my Nikon D70, with a 18-70mm lens at 18mm (equivalent to 27mm on 35mm format), 15 second exposure, f/13. I used RAW file format. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to experiment with the exposure at all.

After I got myself back inside, I used UFRaw (a Gimp plugin) to convert from raw to jpeg for your viewing pleasure. There I used a custom curve which you can get for yourself - but it’s probably going to be completely useless.

First, I got some clouds; it was quite windy and the clouds were moving fast enough that in some of the shots they look quite…scary.

Clouds!

And soon after…ISS! The big light source is the moon…

ISS, take 1

…more ISS…

ISS, take 2

And the best for last…

The bright star is actually Mars. The reason the moon doesn’t look like a circle is because the camera shook a little bit at the beginning of the exposure (take a look at the ISS trail - the beginning is wobbly too).

ISS, take 3

And here we have the ISS about to disappear behind the trees…

ISS, take 4

1 Comments »

  1. That's a moon. And that's a space station! :D

    Comment by [unknown] — January 1, 1970 @ 00:00

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