Olivia and Papa Chase the ISS and More

Last month, my granddaughter Harper and I went out to capture an image of the International Space Station (ISS) flying over Dallas. As described in my post about that effort, we were only partially successful, foiled by clouds. This past Tuesday evening, granddaughter Olivia and I headed up to the north shore of White Rock Lake to try again. In spite of being a little late getting to the lake and rushing to set up cameras, we managed to catch the last 90 seconds or so of the ISS flyover as it traveled from the northwest, overhead and down to the southeast. Here is the result.

This is a composite image created by stacking 9 images taken with a Nikon D750 and a Rokinon 14mm wide angle lens mounted on a tripod. Each shot was 8 seconds long with 2 seconds between each shot. What Olivia and I saw was an incredibly bright "star" moving across the sky, too steady and too fast to be an airplane. It appears as a streak in this image due to the long exposure of each original image; the gaps are due to the delay between each shot while the camera saved the image files. 

This photo demonstrates an interesting aspect of ISS flyovers. We can see the ISS fly by only at certain times and places, its visibility due to the viewer being in a position to see sunlight reflected off of the ISS. For this flyover, as it was traveling "away" from the sun (which had set just over an hour earlier) its orbit carried it into the Earth's shadow. Notice how the lowest trail fades off and disappears. 

Another interesting object in the sky that night was the Sturgeon Moon, the first of two "supermoons" this month. It was cloaked in clouds until just as we were getting in the car to head home so it just appears in this image as a bright glow to the lower left. Note all the people on the dock though; there was quite a crowd out that night with people all up and down the shoreline to watch the full moon rising. I wonder how many of them also realized they were getting a chance to see the ISS, too.

We also tried to capture a flyover of a satellite, BlueWalker 3, which passed over this same view looking south across the lake about a half-hour before the ISS flyover. Unfortunately, even having two cameras shooting during its flyover, we didn't capture it. I'm not sure whether it was due to its lower elevation, the haze to the south east or a miscalculation on my part about where and when we would see it. That'll be a target to try for another night. 

Thanks to the long exposures taken, the composite includes more than just the ISS and the Moon. Stars of the constellation Sagittarius (the Archer) and Scorpio (the Scorpion) are visible including Antares, the red super-giant star that is known as the Heart of the Scorpion. Here is a labeled version of the image above. 

The images above were edited to remove all the other stuff we saw in the sky that night: aircraft. The following is a composite of 12 images stacked "as is" in Photoshop. It shows not only the ISS but all the aircraft trails captured. Having simply stacked the images, stars appear as streaks and headlights and taillights of cars on the far shore of the lake appear as streaks. 

One final image, this time an edited stack of all the images, showing not only the ISS but all the aircraft trails captured. Unlike the unedited stack, in this view the sky (Moon and stars), lake and even the car headlights on the far shore are all from a single image. The aircraft and ISS trails from the other 11 images were masked to overlay that single image.

As always, click on an image to see large. 

Bedroom Camera Obscura Timelapse

Building on the project described in my last post which involved creating a camera obscura out of a bedroom with our grandkids Olivia and Jack, we have taken the project to the next level: video!

For this, we used Olivia's pinhole lens which with its larger aperture allowed shooting shorter exposures. That let us maximize how many frames we could capture in a given amount of time. I re-framed the view in my Nikon D750 to take advantage of the wall space on the right and we then set it up to take one ten-second shot every 12 seconds. At the end of an hour and 10 minutes, I stopped the camera, having taken 348 images. 

The next step was loading the images on the computer, cropping to a 16:9 ratio and adjusting the exposure a little in Lightroom plus inverting them vertically, then using LRTimelapse to render a 4K video. The last step was adding titles and music (Pounded Piano by Podington Bear) in Da Vinci Resolve. 

This was shot at a busy time in the backyard, with our Weimaraner Luna coming and going and with the grass being  mowed. The timelapse also captures clouds floating by and the shadows of trees and such moving. 

This is short but pretty cool... Enjoy! 

Best viewed full-screen. 

Harper and Papa Chasing the ISS

UPDATE: Keep reading for the "rest of the story" but here is the same image as below but cropped vertically to focus attention more on the ISS trail. Enjoy!

Our granddaughter Harper stayed with us this week. During the day, she was attending Dallas Parks & Recreation Outdoor Adventure Camp and the theme this week was photography. As I am an avid shutterbug I also spent a little time each evening with her, messing around with cameras, talking about how to take good pictures, etc. 

As I was checking to see what the evening weather would be with the idea that we could maybe take some night sky shots, I noticed that Tuesday evening the International Space Station (ISS) was going to be passing over. Even better, it would be rising just over downtown when seen from up by White Rock Lake. That night around 9:00 pm, we headed up to Winfrey Point and set up my Nikon D750 with an Irix 15mm wide angle lens. Once the camera was set up on the tripod, I let Harper take all the test shots and then we set the camera to shoot a sequence of 20 second shots. ISS was going to be visible for about 7 minutes, only 3 of which would be visible to the camera facing due west. After it passed overhead, we also tried capturing shots to the northeast but lights and trees were in the way.

The next day we loaded the captured images into Lightroom and I did some basic edits for exposure, contrast, etc. and then we loaded them as layers in a single image in Photoshop. As each layer contained a section of the ISS flyover, our goal was to follow instructions from this online article to stack all the images to end up with one image with a full track of the ISS, from when it was first visible (about 10 degrees above the horizon) until it passed out of the camera frame. 

Unfortunately, while the weather report had been for clear skies, there was actually a lot of haze on the horizon and clouds across the path of the ISS. Here is the result of just stacking all the images.

Harper thinks this version is kind of cool and I agree. The streaks of the clouds are pretty surreal and the airplane trails and the few star trails convey a lot of action.  The problem is that you can only get glimpses of the ISS trail as it is mostly obscured by the clouds. Even where it might have been clearly visible in one frame, once we stack all the other frames on that then some or all of it is obscured by the clouds. 

That led us to research other ways to achieve what we were after. With the help of ChatGPT, we learned some Photoshop techniques that allowed us to selectively mask out everything but the ISS trail, stack those and combine them with a base image that included the foreground with the lake and downtown Dallas and in which most of the clouds were to the right. We also removed a couple of airplane trails so that the ISS trail is the "star" of the image.

Here is the end result. It's not exactly what we intended to shoot - the ISS trail is spotty and the gaps don't always match the cloud gaps in the base image - but we are pretty happy with it. 

This was just the start, though. Now we are watching out for other nights when the ISS will fly overhead where the skies are clear and it will pass over an interesting foreground like the lake and downtown in this image. More to come!

If you are interested in finding out when the ISS flies overhead where you live, there are many resources but one of my favorites is the Heavens Above. Here is the ISS Visible Passes chart and here are the details for the flyover we captured. 

As always, click on an image to enlarge. Clear skies, y'all!

The Road to the Stars

The Road to the Stars
neatonjr @ Flickr

After a long session capturing images of the Milky Way in Big Bend National Park for time lapse, my son Brian and I headed back to the Chisos Basin, stopping along the way at a spot I had mapped out in PhotoPills to capture a shot with a perspective view of the road ahead with the Milky Way beyond. 

Initially the plan had been to capture a sequence of relatively short exposure images with separate foreground and sky shots at different ISO, then stacking registration frames to get the highest quality result possible. Unfortunately, just as I was setting up, we saw headlights down below. With such dark skies, the headlights were obvious while the car was still on Gano Springs Road and about 4 miles away so we knew we had 5-6 minutes but that wasn't enough to capture the planned sequence, just enough to get the composition framed and focused using test shots. I went for one 30 second shot knowing I'd get a little star trailing, then we threw everything back in the car and headed to the lodge. We had finished with enough time that the other car was still a mile or more behind us.

To pull out detail in the foreground, I did initial adjustments to the sky such as exposure, curves, white balance, etc. and then used the Lightroom sky masking tool to mask the sky, inverted it and then made adjustments to lighten the foreground. After touching up some noise spots with the healing brush, this is the end result.

Image details:
Nikon D750 on Radian tripod
Irix Firefly f/2.4 15mm lens
ISO 6400
30 seconds @ f/2.8

Click on the image to see large on Flickr. 

Enjoy!