It had been a while since I had photographed the ISS, the International Space Station. It’s a challenging object to photograph, but having a long telephotos lens for bird photography makes it a worthwhile subject when conditions are right.
I use an app on my phone and a NASA website to see when the ISS is passing over. Most of the passes are not worth the effort. A good pass, the ISS needs to be close to its closest possible distance, and a good start is for when it passes almost right overhead. The pass this evening around 8:30 pm was supposed to be at a maximum angle of about 86° – so close to the best possible at 90°. The brightness was forecast to be a magnitude of -4.2. Again pretty good.
However, one other factor is the weather. It was cloudy during the day and a still a bit cloudy about 8pm. When I looked out a bit later the half Moon looked reasonable clear, so I thought I would give it a go.
For these sorts of objects, I use manual focus, and I was able to set my focus on the Moon.
Then all I had to do was wait to 8:34 and 15 seconds for it too appear. The app told me it would first appear at an elevation of about 10° above the horizon in the North West, then move rapidly overhead and vanish 4 minutes later at an elevation of about 40° when it again went out of the sunlight.
It must have risen in clouds, as I firsts it a bit later. It was quite bright and moving at a very steady pace.
Here are two more photos of it. Note that its orientation appears to change as it passes over. Mots of what you can see are reflection off its solar panels.
Technical details – Focal length 840 mm, 1/1000 second (hand held), f9, 3200 ISO. Images massively cropped.