I took an untracked, long exposure image of the ISS passing over tonight. I noticed it flashed green as it was fading out.

I'm speculating that it's atmospheric distortion, similar to the effect of the green flash sometimes visible during sunset.

Anyone have any other ideas?

Full image, followed by a 100% crop of the flash.

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No one has any ideas? I thought someone would at least have a guess.

Maybe the astronauts were lasing you.

Funny enough, when googling to try and find out what caused this, there were other suggestions as to it being laser related. Obviously, it wasn't.

Perhaps its internal reflection ?

No, this was clearly visible to the naked eye.

Well I guess you could contact NASA and send that picture and see if they can explain what it is .

I'm guessing that the sun reflected off of the solar arrays just right as they are very reflective.

There is reflection from the panels, but why did it turn green for an instant?

I have submitted the question to NASA. Hopefully they answer. They don't allow you to submit links on the question form, so I couldn't provide the image.

Don't expect them to reply with the truth. It was a alien vessel powering up their engines before leaving

I shot it a month or so ago but didn't get any anomalies.

Still haven't heard anything from NASA. I believe they say it could be 10-15 days for a response.

saea501, one thing that's different between our shots is that mine shows the ISS entering the Earth's shadow. It looks like your exposure stopped before that was the case, as there is no fadeout. My suspicion is that the green flash was due to the the light from the sun passing through the atmosphere, so it would coincide with the fadeout.

Hopefully I'll get an answer, soon.

Well, after a month I received a disappointing response for NASA. Sounds like they just saw the term ISS and responded with a form letter about it. Why even have an "Ask NASA" section if they're not going to attempt to answer your question?

I'll try asking in one of the Astronomy forums.

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Are you sure it was the ISS you shot there? It's brightness is very constant as it passes over. More like the example saea501 posted above.

Your shot seems to show it bright then trailing off. Perhaps more like a tumbling type satellite or iridium flare? May also explain the flash of colour?

Absolutely. I had checked for passes on Heavens-Above.com, so I was setup to shoot it. The only Iridium flare that night was about an hour after this, and was barely visible from my location. This was pretty much directly overhead.

The reason it faded out is that it went into shadow.