How To Photograph The Space Station

The Space Station Got Mooned! - The easiest way to get a photo of the space station is by taking a picture of it when it transits the sun or the moon. I started poking around the interwebs looking for a way to predict where it would be and stumbled upon a website that calculates solar and lunar ISS (International Space Station) transits and took it from there.

Even though the image is a little small and blurry you can still see a few interesting things:

The easiest thing to pick out are the solar panels. All together the solar arrays are made up of over 260,000 solar pannels. Each solar array has a wingspan of 240 feet (73 meters) which is longer than a Boeing 777's wingspan.

The two bright white objects are either large heat rejection radiators or two laboratory modules (Columbus and Kibo). Heat generated from the stations electronics and life support systems is collected and transferred via a series tubes containing liquid ammonia to the radiators where the heat is simply dissipated into space like an air conditioner. The radiators reflect a lot of light since they are painted with a highly reflective ceramic coating.

The light blue colors that the photo picked up are also pretty interesting. This is caused the something called Earthshine which is caused by sunlight reflecting the blue color the of the Earth back into space where it landed on the space station.

I saturated the image using photoshop and you can see that the entire top part of the space station is covered in the blue earthshine. You can also see that the bottom part is a golden brown color which is probably from the gold colored solar panels reflecting light onto the bottom part of the space station.

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Equipment:

Celestron C8 Telescope
Canon 7D

Transit Details:

Transit duration: .81sec
Angular size: 46.57 arc seconds
Distance: ~584km

Видео How To Photograph The Space Station канала Jeff Cremer