ISS ... I see you

Okay space watchers ... I'm at it again.

This time it's a photograph of the International Space Station as it passes over Fentress Texas this morning at 6:22 CST.  So how do you know that I'm not just spoofing you and this is just a Piper Cub whizzing overhead.  Well here's the deal.  NASA, our almost defunct space program administrators, have a service that they provide for those who like to spend some part of their lives peering into space when they should be sleeping.  You give them your location and when their computer indicates that the Space Station will be visible to you, they send you an email the day before noting the time it will be visible (at your time zone), the inclination off the horizon, the direction of travel, and how many minutes it will be visible.

So yesterday they sent a message, which BTW, are not sent everyday but maybe once a week, telling me that at 6:22am it will appear in the WNW sky about 49 degrees off the horizon and heading to the SSE.  And most important it would only be visible for 4 minutes!

I got my gear all together the night before ... camera, 24mm-105mm lens, tripod, extension cable, warm clothes (it's still a little chilly here), a red light (so I could see at night) and readied for another foray into the joys of photography.  I made the necessary adjustment to the camera ... Shut off all automatic features, set shutter to 'bulb', locked the mirror up, set the ISO to 400, and settled on an aperture of f11.  Don't quiz me too deep on the f11 as it was more instinct that empirical knowledge.  Anyway I set the alarm for 6:00am and when it jars me into consciousness I leap into action.

The first thing I do is look out the bathroom window.  I have a nice skylight but the bathroom is usually my first stop anyway so ...  Egads ... the moon overhead looks a little fuzzy!  Is this going to be another ruined cloudy day because of the weather, I wonder?  Since I'm now awake, I hurried and got dressed, gathered my gear and stepped outside.  Yup it was cloudy but intermittent with long bands of wispy clouds layered across the sky.  But eureka!  I could see stars in between the cloud bands.  I made a quick calculation where the West North West was, set my camera in place, set the focal length to around 35mm and set the focus to infinity.  I looked at my watch and saw that I still had about 5 minutes left before it would appear so I took a test shot of about 1 minute to see what I would get.  A quick glance at the results confirmed that I would need to increase the exposure time and that the light from the moon would contribute to lighting the bands of passing clouds.  So with the nearby trees, moving clouds but little surface wind, the challenge was about to begin.

6:22 arrived and I strained to see this man-made marvel racing across the sky.  Nothing.  Damn clouds I murmured to myself.  But wait, there it was.  Bright as NASA said it would be (brightest object in the sky other than the moon) and travelling fast ... very fast.  I quickly reposition my camera to reflect the trajectory and fired off the first shot lasting about 90 seconds.  With little time to figure what to do next, I again repositioned the camera toward to southeastern sky and shot another exposure.  There it was ... and there it wasn't.  That was a fast 4 minutes!

Here's the best of the two exposures.  I can't wait till I get word of the next viewing.

ISS emerging from the WNW horizon at the bottom

So I admit I'm still a kid at heart as this stuff still excites me after many years of star gazing.  From laying in the backyard straining to see the first Russian Sputnik and America's Vanguard satellites as a youngster, to standing next to the last gigantic Saturn V rocket at Cape Canaveral, to watching three Space Shuttle launches ... to this.

Still livin' the dream.

Phil