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 :-).

This is actually a botched photo, because the camera didn’t do the full 80 seconds I wanted it to do, but with a bit of cropping it looks nice, too. But this photo is amazing alone for the fact that I captured it at exactly the moment when Arianespace launched the ESA ATV-4 space freighter Albert Einstein to the ISS!

A followup to yesterday’s wobbly and cloudy space station trail – this one is the one I actually wanted to do and it turned out quite well. I cut down from 128 to 80 seconds, which was actually perfect since the exposure ended just as the ISS was beginning to fade out and vanish behind the tree. There’s still some sensor glow in the top left, but otherwise it’s still not bad for a camera that was built for a maximum of 15 seconds exposure!

A late night post – my first try catching the International Space Station with the S5. Not perfect by a long shot, just a try… problem was, my tripod seems to wobble and pushing the camera to a 128 second exposure with CHDK is not really advisable because it causes some blue sensor noise in the top left. But the image is cleaner than the S2 with its maximum of 64 seconds ever was. I’m still experimenting, there’s another pass in an hour which I’ll also try to get if the weather holds up.

Something special for the 30th stacked moon: a comparison showing that the supermoon is really visible.

A double moon just to celebrate that we can actually see it! Not perfect photos by any means, but as usual this is astrophotography on a budget with an old bridge camera.

Der Mond von gestern Abend – weil wir die partielle Mondfinsternis von heute Abend verpaßt haben :-(.
100% Größe, gestackt von 20 Bildern, mit ein bißchen Schärfe und Kontrast.

Mond vom 22. April, mit und ohne blauem Himmel :-).