Photographing the International Space Station

From Earth, of course. My new tripod and I have been trying to photograph the ISS. My first image was a bit shaky looking and puzzled me.



I reckoned it was either camera shake from the mirror movement - but the camera's 2s timer is designed to move the mirror, then capture the image, so that probably wasnt it. Then I thought it's what the ISS does - that didn't last long. It was hardly atmospheric either, so I thought it must have been the deck - not the world's most secure surface, so as I walked on it, the tripod was moving.

The ground was to be the next surface so, and with a pass at 1830 I set up, pointed and took the following. Sorry about the poor crop.


Looks a lot better. Lesson learned. I may try again - there's another pass in about half an hour.

Thanks to http://iss.astroviewer.net for an excellent, easy to use website for timing the ISS passes for your location.

Later on, I got a pic of the ISS trail just as the station passed into Earth's shadow...