ISS through Telescope this AM

[Yoda]

Caught the ISS this morning in an early pass over my Observatory !
Not too shabby !

 

[halcyon]

That's just amazing.

 

[george7378]

Wow - absolutely amazing! What did you use? Was it auto-tracked?

 

[Yoda]

Wow - absolutely amazing! What did you use? Was it auto-tracked?

I used a Nikon D3000 DLR attached to a Meade LX90 telescope shooting at ISO 800 with shutterspeed of 1/250 while manual tracking the ISS with a red-dot finder.

Manual tracking is by far the easiest way of doing this as longs your red-dot finder is aligned with your main scope.

Just track through the red-dot finder while you keep shooting pictures as you track.
Out of 140 pictures taken this AM there were about 10 that showed some good detail of the ISS.

 

[Messierhunter]

Well-done! I was never any good at hand tracking satellites. I tried it a few times early on but found that my hands just weren't steady enough to produce a single clear picture. Auto-tracking is challenging as well, it took me about 6 years before I realized that a dual camera setup was the only way to make it work reliably, but in the end I found it to be much easier for me. I think it's a personal preference kind of thing.