![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Finding Atlantis...
Sep. 15th, 2000 07:19 amThe periodic run of a satellite-tracking program on my PalmPilot (PocketSat v2.0, for the curious) informed me that the ISS (together with the docked Shuttle Atlantis) would pass nearly overhead this morning a few minutes after 6 am. Curious to see how bright the combination of ISS+Shuttle would appear (and anxious to make up for my one-hour goof of a couple of weeks ago), I set my alarm.
The morning sky was largely clear, with a huge, nearly-full moon in the southwest sky, from which the ISS would appear. According to the program, the ISS would rise above the horizon just after 6:01 am, becoming visible a few minutes later as it entered sunlight. From there, it would travel toward the northeast, dropping back down below the horizon at 6:11 am.
Give or take a minute, the projected times were right on the money. I again had taken the time to set up my digital camera, just to see what would happen. It turns out that taking a 16-second exposure of a sky with a full moon in it yields a picture that appears as though one had taken a picture of the sun. Two things that give away the fact that it's not a shot of the sun are: (1) some stars appear in the photo, and (2) the CCD element of the camera isn't burned out (i.e., the camera still takes pictures).
I divided my time during the pass to simply experiencing it and taking two pictures of it. The first picture was taken with my initial setup, pointed halfway up the southwest sky, so after I pressed the shutter release, I simply forgot about the camera for a little bit, sat back in my lawn chair for a minute or so, and just watched this point of light press on smoothly through the sky. Nothing that small, yet so bright, covers more sky that fast. I then mobilized myself, repositioned the camera, and took a second picture as the station passed nearly overhead, through the constellation Perseus.
The photos are fairly ho-hum, consisting of a straight-line streak (the moving ISS) on a field of dots (stationary stars). While it's nothing to get wild about, here, for the record (and after a little resampling to keep the image size manageable), is what the second shot looks like:
One thing that may be confusing about the picture is why the ISS shows up as a line segment (with ends) instead of a long, continuous line. The streak has ends only because the exposure started when the ISS was at the left-most point of the streak, and it ended when the ISS reached the right-most point. If the exposure were longer, the streak would be, too.
If you look real hard, you can see, besides the streak, a darker mass on the right-hand side of the image (which is a tree in my back yard :^) and two points of light above the streak. One is near the top of the image, about a third of the distance (or so) from the left end of the streak. This is the star labeled with the Greek letter "zeta" in the constellation Perseus. The second star is just above the streak, about one third of the way in from the right-hand side; this is the star "epsilon" in Perseus.
At any rate, it's time to start getting ready to do Friday at work. I've got a couple of ISO corrective actions to be audited on, and I have to get cracking on the development of a draft Technology Control Plan. Ah, well, it keeps me off the streets.
Cheers...
P.S. Greetings to new friend zartan, whose posts score high upon my first read (and there is so much to read!).
The morning sky was largely clear, with a huge, nearly-full moon in the southwest sky, from which the ISS would appear. According to the program, the ISS would rise above the horizon just after 6:01 am, becoming visible a few minutes later as it entered sunlight. From there, it would travel toward the northeast, dropping back down below the horizon at 6:11 am.
Give or take a minute, the projected times were right on the money. I again had taken the time to set up my digital camera, just to see what would happen. It turns out that taking a 16-second exposure of a sky with a full moon in it yields a picture that appears as though one had taken a picture of the sun. Two things that give away the fact that it's not a shot of the sun are: (1) some stars appear in the photo, and (2) the CCD element of the camera isn't burned out (i.e., the camera still takes pictures).
I divided my time during the pass to simply experiencing it and taking two pictures of it. The first picture was taken with my initial setup, pointed halfway up the southwest sky, so after I pressed the shutter release, I simply forgot about the camera for a little bit, sat back in my lawn chair for a minute or so, and just watched this point of light press on smoothly through the sky. Nothing that small, yet so bright, covers more sky that fast. I then mobilized myself, repositioned the camera, and took a second picture as the station passed nearly overhead, through the constellation Perseus.
The photos are fairly ho-hum, consisting of a straight-line streak (the moving ISS) on a field of dots (stationary stars). While it's nothing to get wild about, here, for the record (and after a little resampling to keep the image size manageable), is what the second shot looks like:
One thing that may be confusing about the picture is why the ISS shows up as a line segment (with ends) instead of a long, continuous line. The streak has ends only because the exposure started when the ISS was at the left-most point of the streak, and it ended when the ISS reached the right-most point. If the exposure were longer, the streak would be, too.
If you look real hard, you can see, besides the streak, a darker mass on the right-hand side of the image (which is a tree in my back yard :^) and two points of light above the streak. One is near the top of the image, about a third of the distance (or so) from the left end of the streak. This is the star labeled with the Greek letter "zeta" in the constellation Perseus. The second star is just above the streak, about one third of the way in from the right-hand side; this is the star "epsilon" in Perseus.
At any rate, it's time to start getting ready to do Friday at work. I've got a couple of ISO corrective actions to be audited on, and I have to get cracking on the development of a draft Technology Control Plan. Ah, well, it keeps me off the streets.
Cheers...
P.S. Greetings to new friend zartan, whose posts score high upon my first read (and there is so much to read!).
