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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  2687 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The two images in this post were impossible to take before 2002AD

Are these sequential frames from your video?

Fourteen minutes seems a long time in advance to start recording. How precise was your expectation of the timing? Were you just being extra cautious?

Do you think there would be any chance of observing a transit like this with the naked eye? Given the speed and size of the IIS, I suppose it would be tough.

Do you remember the Light Ring project? Astronomers cried foul, but I think it would have been kind of cool.

Your images, showing texture along the terminator, in my opinion rival the recent supermoon APoD.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap161114.html



user-inactivated  ·  2686 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
user-inactivated  ·  2687 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Fourteen minutes seems a long time in advance to start recording

That is a typo. Started recording 5 minutes prior. The calculations assume that the earth is a perfect sphere, and of course it is not. Then you input your height above the median geodesic zero point (used to be called mean sea level). As you are probably going to be off by either a few meters in GPS coordinates, or multiple meters in altitude, there is always a variation. One pass was a whole 45 seconds early, one pass was about 30 seconds late due to the altitude differences in what the maps say versus the "real" height above or below the way they calculate the transits. The ISS was very very cleanly visible in the phone's screen.

These are not sequential. The camera was running in 2K mode at about 45FPS, the ISS was over the moon for 1.11 seconds. these two images showed the ISS better in stills; in the video you can really see it move along. Working on making it a gif image.

    Do you think there would be any chance of observing a transit like this with the naked eye?

ABSOLUTELY. I've done it. In this event, the ISS was in shadow, I've tried twice now to get it lit up but each time bad things happened and I did not get an image. When the ISS is lit up in the transit you can watch it cross the sky and then the moon.

The website is transit-finder.com You can see if there are any transits visible to you. When you see a transit, click on the more information button and it will tell you, among other things, if the ISS is lit or in shadow.

    Your images, showing texture along the terminator, in my opinion rival the recent supermoon APoD.

I have about 200 still images that are WAY better than this that I will tinker with over the weekend.

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