"227 miles outside the box" (International Space Station)
I have been curious for a long time whether it would be possible to photograph the international space station as it passed overhead. I had been watching the NASA website and making notes of when an opportunity might come with the ISS passing in close proximity to my location. On Thursday evening 6/24/10, at 94pm, that opportunity came, and it was suposed to be visible for around 4 minutes, starting when it was about 800 miles away in the light of the sun, eventually passing to as close as 227 miles. Since the weather was clear, I went outside about 5 minutes prior to the beginning of the viewing window with a 500 f4 and 1.4x mounted on a 40d body. My plan was to try and hand hold the rig using autofocus and see if I could lock onto the 'dot' as it passed overhead, then find out if any detail could be captured from this far away. I made some practice shots of the moon to try guestimate the correct exposure, and I decided on 1/250, f8, iso 400, using full manual exposure, but with autofocus, and image stabilization mode 1, since it would be more of a 'hold it steady' motion than a panning motion. The ISS was easy to see with the naked eye as it apprached, and I was able to locate it in the camera viewfinder and fire off some shots while trying very hard to keep the bright dot in the center of the frame. I was surprised that the 40d actually locked focus very easily most of the time.
Of a couple dozen shots, only a few taken when the subject was the closest showed any real detail. I believe this image is my best shot. It is shown here as a 100% crop, but opened as a 25.2 MP file in photoshop. Since the native resolution of the camera is 3888 x 2592, this is 1.58 times the actual size in the camera. I tried a second attempt Sunday morning at 4
Processing details: Increased brightness of the raw file, converted to JPG, then brought out more detail using shadow/highlight tool, and sharpened.
Originally Posted by Mark Fuge
