Saturday, February 4, 2017

ISS Transiting the Sun

This past summer I was told of a great website (ISS Transit Finder).  Inputting your Lat. and Lon. it will calculate if and when the ISS will cross between you and the Sun, and Moon.  So I punched my data and "bingo" there was going to be a pass, actually 2 passes came up, a week apart.  I decided to try capturing this event.  Well the weather wasn't good for the first pass, but I set up anyway.  I set up my Lunt LS60-THa solar scope with a MallinCam Micro ex.  What I needed to do is capture a video of the transit.  The actual transit takes less than 1 second.  in this case it was .54 sec.  Even with the skies so poor I figured I would try a test run.  I wasn't even sure how accurate this info was going to be.  I had a few friends over to witness this event.  Just as it was time for the transit the clouds thinned a bit.  We didn't see a thing.  But after playing back the video we did catch a glimpse of the ISS.  Wow, this actually worked.  The fallowing week the weather was perfect.  I was already to go.  I was sertup like the previous week with the Lunt solar scope.  I started capturing the video and with in a second there it went.  
I took the captured AVI video and used the 20 frames that showed the ISS transit.  Using RegiStax this is what I was able to get.  Next time I will speed up the frame rate of the camera to get a better image.
 

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