Actually, it’s hard to believe that, in over sixteen years of posting, I haven’t used that title before…
So early this morning, the ISS was supposed to pass in front of the moon again, at least in my location, and I was all prepared to go out after it again. I didn’t have visibility here at Walkabout Estates Plus, so I packed my gear down to a spot just off the waterfront, making sure I had the tripod and cable release and 2X teleconverter, and checking my watch against the online atomic clock for accuracy.
The moon was still low and semi-shrouded in haze, not the best of conditions, but I changed camera settings to ensure that I could pull off a reasonably fast shutter speed to halt the motion – this meant going with a very high ISO and thus introducing lots of grain, but you do what you have to.
All set up and dialed in ahead of time, focus down as tight as I could get it with the haze, watching the clock, and fired off a long high-speed sequence of frames as the time reached just before zero, to try and bracket any slop that might have occurred.
Back home, I’m carefully examining the resulting images for signs of the space station, not finding any hint (noting as I did so that the camera’s clock was about three minutes off, but I wasn’t using that to time the shots.) Then I thought to check the site again, not exactly sure why. But it revealed to me that the transit was at 00:42:19, not at 00:49:19 when I actually fired off the frames. I even had the reminder in my calendar for the proper time – I just got it switched in my head sometime during the run-up and never corrected myself.
So this is what the moon looks like exactly seven minutes after the ISS passes in front. In case you were wondering…