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ISS Lunar Transit, Bruce Rohrlach

ISS Lunar Transit

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

ISS Lunar Transit

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

Description

An International Space Station (ISS) lunar transit on Monday evening - low in the WSW sky at just 13.1 degrees elevation meant the ISS was quite small. Luckily didn't have to travel in order to get the ISS almost exactly through the middle of the crescent new moon, as the pass centreline was just south of home and ran along Wellington Rd.

Had originally planned to start a 90 second recording 45 seconds before the transit. But at the last minute, I thought, heck, I should be able to see the ISS (naked eye) and then start to record just prior to arrival at the moon. Nope, no 'visual' sign of the ISS (in hindsight it was too faint being too low to the horizon), so as the seconds ticked by, thoughts racing through my mind were that the delay may be due to NASA giving the ISS one of its episodic orbital correcting boosts in the last 24 hours, that might have put the arrival time back by 10-20 seconds. I started to get nervous, so right on scheduled transit time decided I had better start to record anyway, even though it was no where to be seen visually. Just as well. The ISS raced across the screen doing its 2.37 second transit just as the camera started to record, so was lucky to capture the transit.

Currently 6 astronauts are on board, the latest 3 were launched on 14th October (a week ago) and will stay on board for the next 6 months, equating to around 2825 complete orbits (one every 93 minutes) before returning home.

The faint illumination of the dark side of the moon is Earthshine, sunlight reflected from earth that subtlety illuminates the shaded dark side of the moon.

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ISS Lunar Transit, Bruce Rohrlach