This is the ISS passing over Mülheim on August 14th and again I have to mention that the space station was not drunk, but my tripod still tends to wobble a little. The glow in the lower left corner is not light pollution, but comes from the sensor because the camera isn’t actually built to do a 128-second exposure.

Once again, this is too wobbly – I think I was breathing on the camera or something. But it’s a nice 128-second capture of the ISS from the pass about one hour ago with lots of star trails in the background.

Two days ago, I captured the ISS for the first time in almost two months – still low in the southeast, but this 128-second exposure doesn’t look bad at all. I don’t know why it brightened so suddenly, but the streaks on the left are actually reflections from the balcony lamps I was too lazy to turn off. I could have edited them out, but let’s pretend it’s a cool lens flare :-).

Tonight was the last chance to see the ATV-4 before it docks to the ISS tomorrow, but it was not dark enough to see it. Even this ISS pass was hard to get – with 128 seconds exposure the sky got very bright, but at f/8 it still worked out as a blue sky version. It’s still a bit wobbly, but not as bad as the last one!

Another futile attempt to get a trail of the ATV-4 Albert Einstein space transporter. I saw it, but my camera doesn’t seem to like it and just exposed 15 seconds instead of 64 and didn’t even save a RAW – I think there’s a bug in CHDK somewhere. But with a little bit of filtering I was able to at least somewhat bring the trail out. Maybe I’ll get lucky tonight when if the weather holds…

The “I need a new tripod” capture of yesterday evening’s ISS flyover. I thought the camera was steady, but in spite of the slightly wobbly trail it’s a nice photo with the station vanishing in the clouds.

The ATV-4 still eludes me, but here’s an even better ISS pass from yesterday – almost straight from west to east. This is an 128-second exposure with an experimental noise filter that actually works quite well and even leaves the fainter star trails intact. I think this might be my best ISS capture of the year so far!

The only photo I got yesterday of ESA’s ATV-4 Albert Einstein space transporter, which has launched on Wednesday and is on its way to the ISS. I totally botched this one – I didn’t expect it to be so dim and I forgot to turn on RAW saving, so the result looks horrible… but the trail is visible. I’m going to try again later tonight – the ATV is now on the same orbit as the ISS and comes just about 15 minutes after the space station. Check your location on Heavens-Above.com, you can watch yourself!

I wanted to do something different for the second ISS pass yesterday, so I turned the camera sideways and did a 128-second exposure to get a really long view of the pass. Again, I didn’t even attempt to filter out the noise, only a little colour correction and contrast/brightness balancing. The sensor glow is still there, but not so distracting because it’s at the bottom in the tree – the glow on the horizon is, however, real light pollution from the city around us.

Okay, I think I’m getting the hang of the new camera now. This is the ISS pass from about 0:33 to 0:40 a short while ago – travel direction is right to left in this 64-second exposure. I brightened it up a bit to bring the startrails out, but I left the noise in because filtering would just result in a blurry mess. I got the ATV transporter in a seperate image too, but I somewhat botched the first attempt – I’m going to post the second attempt tomorrow, or rather later today :-).