Contains:  Other
International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope cross paths at Fingal Head., Kelvin Hennessy

International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope cross paths at Fingal Head.

International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope cross paths at Fingal Head., Kelvin Hennessy

International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope cross paths at Fingal Head.

Description

This is an equirectangular projection of a 360 degree panorama taken at Fingal Head in Australia 1.5 hours before sunrise.

The two dashed lines are the International Space Station and Hubble Space telescope, taken over a 9 minute time period.

The light coming up from the horizon near the satellite trails is known as the Zodiacal light. The Milky Way arch is setting over the Fingal Head Lighthouse to the west, with my home town of Kingscliff to the left.

The strange appearance of the stars at the top of the image is not extreme distortion or coma but rather how the compressed image data from the zenith photo ends up looking as a requirement to load into a 360 degree virtual reality viewer.

The resultant 360 degree panorama can be viewed at my website here. https://photo.phasefour.com.au/panorama/#ISS-HST-Fingal

I used a Canon 6D camera, Sigma 14-24mm lens at 18mm and a SkyWatcher AllView robotic panoramic mount. I took 22 x 30 second exposures for the satellites frame then an additional 19 shots to create the full 360 degree panorama (3 rows of 6 at 65 deg, 20 deg and - 30 degrees plus Zenith and Nadir photos).

The satellite photos were registered against each other and blended in AstroPixelProcessor (to negate their movement in the sky) and the panorama created in PTGui Pro. Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz DeNoise and Affinity Photo were all used to complete the image.

I used the Heavens-above website and Stellarium app for the initial planning.

Comments

Histogram

International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope cross paths at Fingal Head., Kelvin Hennessy