NGC 4250 gets photobombed by the ISS (lowenthalm)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Draco (Dra) · Contains: NGC 4250 · PGC 2737448 · TYC4396-1710-1 · TYC4397-1222-1 · TYC4397-1244-1 · TYC4397-1400-1 · TYC4397-1512-1 · TYC4397-1640-1

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NGC 4250 gets photobombed by the ISS

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)

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NGC 4250 gets photobombed by the ISS

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)

I got to thinking about trying to image the ISS a few days ago after seeing someone post an image of ISS on Astrobin and a local club member posted an image of the ISS as it passed in front of the Sun in silhouette. After a false start, I got this image.

First I captured the ISS as it passed this little galaxy, NGC 4250. I let the ISS pass through the field with exposure set to 0.3ms to prevent pixel smearing at a scale of 0.5 arc seconds. At about 11 fames per second, these images are about 0.1 seconds of motion apart. This gave me 7 snaps of the ISS (it only took less than half a second to cross the frame!), which I then stacked. I used a star that was repeated during stacking to copy the the stacked image back into the seven different spots it had had been within the image frame to produce a single image of 7 copies of the ISS showing the track across the field. Then, I switched to normal EAA exposures and did two 10 minute live-stacks of 1.5 second subs (1200 total), and then combined them and the ISS image. A little tricky because of the wildly different exposures, but easier than I expected.

You may notice there are only 7 copies of the ISS. One had to be cropped out near the upper edge of the image because the edge was ragged there due to field rotation during the exposure.

Now a little perspective, universe scaling:

ISS distance: about 350 miles.

ISS size about 350 to 250 feet.

Galaxy distance: 110 million light years.

Galaxy size: about 60,000 light years.

The galaxy still appears bigger than the ISS here! ...and this is a pipsqueak little galaxy.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2831429
PixInsight job	KFZ0LQ39UM8K0QK6CFW08XFHVE0165FF
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	12h17m45s.280
RA (top/left)	12h21m00s.195
RA (top/right)	12h17m46s.786
RA (bottom/right)	12h14m28s.260
RA (bottom/left)	12h17m43s.351

Dec (center)	+70°44′57″.87
Dec (top/left)	+70°38′35″.37
Dec (top/right)	+71°02′18″.25
Dec (bottom/right)	+70°51′07″.41
Dec (bottom/left)	+70°27′37″.87

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NGC 4250 gets photobombed by the ISS

NGC 4250 gets photobombed by the ISS

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NGC 4250 gets photobombed by the ISS

NGC 4250 gets photobombed by the ISS

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