This post is for anyone interested in learning how one person recently shot spectacular images of the orbiting ISS. The technique is used by Dave Cash and is featured at http://www.djcash.demon.co.uk/astro/webcam/webcam.htm I just obtained more detailed information via a personal e-mail and am sharing it here. [Dave taped a wooden stick to his scope to aid his manual tracking. The webcam that he uses blocks his view of what he is shooting so he simply lines the ISS up in the cross hairs of a finder and hopes he gets it!] Dave replied........"To answer your questions: The wooden stick was an improvisation "in the field" to try to get better and finer control over the pointing of the scope. The stick is about 2 or 3 foot long and is taped to the front and back of the scope tube above the declination bearing. About 1 foot or so projects back behind the mirror cell to act as a kind of lever. I was quite surprised at how well it seemed to work. What you do is make sure that the scope and finder are well aligned. You need to make sure that when a bright star is centered on the finder cross hairs that it's image is centered in the PC webcam preview window. Once the ISS is sighted with the naked eye, start the webcam recording and then try to keep it's image centered on the finder cross hairs by using the lever to track it. Most of the time the ISS never makes it into the field of view but if you are lucky you may bet a few good frames that show it !!! I tend to get about 1000 frames in my AVI's but only about 20 frames show the ISS, and of those only a few are sharp enough to show details. Still it's worth trying. If you need any more information then please let me know Best wishes Dave" djcash@djcash.demon.co.uk Tom Wagner USA ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jun 09 2001 - 11:34:59 PDT