ISS, Jupiter and Venus

well, you'd know the planets are back in force when the webcam gets dusted down and turned on for the first time in a long while.

So I tried geting shots of Venus and Jupiter. The seeing was average and the jetstream was not good on the night, but in this country you take what you get weather wise.

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Io is the dot to the left, Ganymede is the dot to the right. Unfortunately the GRS was not in view. Taken with the 12"LX200


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Its brightness makes it not as easy as you might think for a planet with absolutely no features on it

A few days later, encouraged on by good Iridium satellite tracking by the LX200, and reading Thierry Legault ISS imaging article in S&T, I treid getting it with the 12"LX200 in the dome. On the first few passes I just took in the view through the eyepiece and got used to compensating for slight tracking deviations, I was surprised by how clear you can see it through the eyepiece, clear as a bell, there it was with modules, solar panels, the whole lot, no bother with a widefield eyepeice.
I then tried it with the webcam, this was altogether a far more difficult task, as the FOV of the webcam is tiny, so I only got about 100 frames of the entire pass with something on it and only about 20 that weren't smeared. This frame was the best of them. It was taken on the 24th Feb 2012, 7.56pm and 55 seconds. I found that stacking only made things worse. This was my first try of this, I'm hoping to someday somehow make up a proper video of the pass, if I get enough frames.

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Wow those are great shots Dave.ISS looks really great considering that's your first attempt having a go at it.

Well done Dave some really nice images there. The ISS is not easy at all to image because of the small fov in the webcam. But the views through the eyepiece are outstanding. Well done on the images

Carl.

Great images Dave your ISS is amazing. Many congrats.

thanks guys, I'm trying to made sense of the ISS image, is there a program out there that will show its orientation so I can see exactly what I'm lookin at.

Dave_Lillis wrote: thanks guys, I'm trying to made sense of the ISS image, is there a program out there that will show its orientation so I can see exactly what I'm lookin at.

That's the problem imaging the ISS its moving so fast and spinning also. Your mount and my mount are not designed two move like that this is why the ISS moves out of the FOV so fast, and next to impossible to keep in a screen via a webcam