July 29, 2020 – International Space Station
Recently I wanted to shift gears from DSO and Planetary imaging and switch to man made satellites and if it is even possible to image them without manually pointing your telescope at them and hope for the best.
I found out that for best results you can purchase a Meade LX200 and follow (Astronomy Live) approach of close loop satellite tracking, my problem is I don’t own LX200 and to be honest I can’t justify spending all this money to buy a telescope to image only the ISS.
https://youtu.be/sclc5iDyWjEInstead I wanted to see if I can make any mount/telescope track the ISS automatically and get a decent image without breaking my back trying to manually track it, so here is what I did as well as my results so far which I have to say I am pleased with.
- You will need a telescope with long focal length and fast optics, mine is SkyWatcher 180Mak which is 2700mm F/15
- You will need a sensitive camera that can handle high FPS, mine is ASI174MM which can handle 120FPS at full resolution
- Any mount (EQ or Alt-Az) should work as long as you can control it from your computer, mine is iOptron CEM25P
- You will need this software, it is free for 30days then you will have to buy it for $9, the cost of the software is donated to support school for orphaned children, which I would be more than happy to donate for free (
https://heavenscape.com), there is a video in that page that explain in details how the software work, which is more than enough.
- Focus is very important, and you will get some really good results if you use a Bahtinov Mask
- Your mount will need to be accurately aligned, preferable with 3 stars alignment, basically what you need after the alignment process, once you slow to a certain star then that star will show up in your imaging camera preferablely dead center.
- You will also need a lot of storage, with my setup, the tracking video was almost 45GB
- I would suggest giving it a try with different satellites just to check if you can track it true.
- Your mount will need to be accurately aligned, preferable with 3 stars alignment, basically what you need after the alignment process, once you slow to a certain star then that star will show up in your imaging camera preferably dead center.r exposure time is extremely fast because the ISS is super-fast and with long exposure you will lose all the details because it will be blurred.
- Also you computer time/date will need to be super accurate, I found by switching to Internet time server to time.nist.gov gave me the best results.
Now usually what will happen is your mount will (leap frog) in front of the satellite path for a certain amount of seconds and wait, once the satellite pass in your FOV then your mount will slew again ahead of the Satellite path and wait and this process will go on until it’s gone, and hopefully by then you will captured enough frames in focus that you can be pleased with.
Finally I’ve attached my first attempt as well as my final results and I hope you will like it as well as will inspire you to do it yourself.
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