Blessed With An Extraordinary Life

I got rid of everything I owned and I'm going round the world. I got the extraordinary life I was looking for. Now I've got to get busy living it. The journey started here.

International Space Station photography (20th - 21st April 2007)

Got the call on Friday night from my mate Ian that the International Space Station would be making a couple of nice visible passes over town shortly and would provide an ideal opportunity for some long exposure starlight photography, which I hadn't tried before. Well, what with one thing and another and a phone call at the last minute, I ended up running most of the way and sprinting across the little green we were shooting from, trying to figure out how to work the exposure and aparture on my camera (which I'd never really worked out) with minutes to spare.

Got set up just in time, but on the first pass the sky was way too bright (at 4 second exposure it looked like dayligh) and we could hardly make it out. You can just see the streak in the first shot (not really visible on the thumb) - it's the tiny near-vertical streak perpendicular to the longer, diagonal jet stream.

Came back an hour and a half later, and the sky was good and dark but a real haze had come up and as soon as the ISS showed it just disappeared into it. Did get some nice skyline and moon shots (with Venus in juxtaposition), though.

I came back myself the following night, and shot from a different hillside - actually I lay flat on the pavement of Turners Hill with the camera on the Gorilla Pod and mostly shot by guesswork because I had to aim so high the screen was invisible! Got a few really good clear shots, though. I'll put them all up here so anyone interested can see the progression. These ones are just clear enough that you can see the streak on the thumnails, but much better on the fullsize images. The first shot is of the ISS on the "ascent" from the horizon, and the rest are it traversing and disappearing toward the horizon on the other side.