hi this is Graham from Jenham's Astro today we're going to try something a
little bit different we're going to try to photograph the International Space
Station passing in front of the Sun so this is the setup we're going to use from
a celestron c90 MAksutov, on the front we've got a white light solar filter
which is made from Baader solar film I've got the scope on top of an
equatorial mount though I suppose it's possibly optional you can do this with
an alt azimuth now and I've got a Canon digital SLR and according to a couple of
the online apps Transit Finder and CalSky those are predicted transit of the
space station in front of the Sun in around half an hour and I'm going to try
to capture it on video okay so before we have a go at trying to photograph the
transit just a quick recap on using one of these programs so I'm using transit
finder.Go onto the web page and basically you tell the app where you are
in the world so you can select that from a map or it can also detect your
location if you use this on your phone for example if location services
are enabled so save and close your location specify a range of dates that
you're interested in that you want to know future transits and close passes of
the Sun and the moon and then you specify if you are willing to travel a
certain distance from your location you can type that value in as well and press
calculate and the app goes away and comes back with a series of future solar
close passes and transits and the same for the moon now for each one you get
all the vital information you need you get a the exact time when the trans is
going to occur which is very important for the space station because they're
always very short and the direction you're going to see the transit and the
time that it will take for the space station to cross the Sun or the moon so
you can look forward plan a little bit and find the best potential transit for
your location and get set up in advance it's a really
good app I recommend you have a look and see what it says for your location
so aside from the scope and the camera etc Well you need to capture a solar
transit well the most important thing is an accurate clock the trend is going to
take a very short period of time and unlike a transit in front of the Moon
where you can see the bright Space Station approaching the moon in the case
of the Sun it's all going to be over very quickly and you won't get much
warning except for having an accurate grip on the time so I've compared the
online apps they've both agreed to within one second of the time when the
transit will occur and I've got a clock which I believe is is accurate and we're
going to give it a go I'm going to use video to bracket the exposure and hope
that there's an increased chance of capturing the transit.
yeah okay so in case you missed that let's have another look so this time
playing the video at 1/4 of its actual speed and you can see the space station
transiting across the disk after taking the video I've been extracted a few
frames at nought point two seconds apart and I'll stack them into this mosaic
which shows you I think quite a nice picture of the of the transit and then
finally a closer for that picture you can see just about see the solar arrays
sticking out on either end of the space station pretty happy with that so
overall I'd say give this a try definitely worth a go have a look at one
of those transit apps and just make sure you'll prepare because this will happen
very rapidly you've got to get all your focusing sorted out before the transit
occurs ok thanks for watching