ISS & Shuttle tonight - who's up for imaging it!?

All good questions Carl.
Best to use the Moon as a guide.
Its a lot of guesswork.
As for processing, I'd worry about getting 1 or 2 seconds on the avi first!
Best a luck everyone!

what speed roughly do we see the ISS travel at ? not in kph , but in degrees or handspans or something a little more tangible. Im thinking i as my mount has 9 slew speeds, one of them should be up to the task of keeping pace with the ISS. i gues id have to polar allign to something other than polaris though.

what speed roughly do we see the ISS travel at ? not in kph , but in degrees or handspans or something a little more tangible. Im thinking i as my mount has 9 slew speeds, one of them should be up to the task of keeping pace with the ISS. i gues id have to polar allign to something other than polaris though.

This evening's pass at 18:54 lasts for 249 seconds horizon to horizon, so it will be trollying across the sky at roughly 249 / 180 = 1.38 seconds perdegrees. This is approximate as I don't know if the Heavens-Above times refer to when the ISS becomes visible on the local horizon or is simply in our 'hemishpere.' Also, you may need to take atmospheric refraction into account when trying to acquire the ISS low down on the western horizon. Either way you're going to have to give your drive the beans to keep up. 3rd party servo-motor drive systems like SiTech can be programmed to slew and track at almost any rate desired - especially useful for tracking NEO closest approaches.

Phil.

Cheers Phil. You were pretty much spot on according to my watch. I had it in view for about 2 mins. It sure was BRIGHT.

I thought i could make out the shape of the shuttle but i think that was just my imagination. God knows my bins would not be up for that amount of magnification.

Oh well, events conspired to leave me with too little time to set up the full kit so it was a "watch and enjoy" experience with a couple of grabbed widefields of which this was the better....

What a difference a few miles makes Paul. It crossed pretty close to M42 from where i am.

Great pic BTW.