This morning I managed to drag myself out of bed at 4am to try and catch the 0506 ISS lunar transit. Bleary eyed , I opened the curtains to find that , surprise surprise , I was yet again , clouded in. The Moon was just a faint silvery , featureless disk. However in true "Transiteer" fashion , I made a cup of tea ................ and waited to see if things improved. They didn't ! With 20 minutes to go I decided to set up anyway , despite the cloud. At least it wasnt raining....yet ! By setting exposure at 1/100th of a second and increasing brightness and gain , the main lunar features were pulled out of the murk by the good old LX90 cloud cutter. Come the alloted time , I set the video running and stared hopefully at the laptop screen. Not a sausage :o( I even left the camera running a minute over time in case the station was late , but it never materialised. Then the rain came and everything was packed away rather quickly. Back inside I mulled over my failure . The station was in shadow for this transit , but with an angular diameter in excess of 30" I should have seen something . Had I confused GMT with BST ? Checking the latest TLEs confirmed I *had* been looking at the right time. Finally I decided to load the video file to a desktop , apply the GPS timestamp and go through the frames one by one. There , like a ghostly spectre was the station , just visible in a couple of frames , looking slightly elongated due to the longer exposure time. It hadnt gone round the back of the Moon after all ! ( Thanks for that suggestion Arnold !) It just goes to show that in the most foul conditions , its possible to salvage something.....even if you do need Xray specs to see it ;O) The station was by the way bang on time , and just as Calsky.com and Tom Fly's ISS alert had predicted. Check the animation at http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/satcom_transits/lunard.GIF John http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/satcom_transits ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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