ISS with 400 2.8 + 4x TC

I woke up 1-1/2 hours before sunrise this morning to stake out a passing celebrity - the International Space Station whizzing by within 366 km from my backyard. There were scattered thin clouds, but this morning's pass was unusually bright at magnitude -3.7. I've to stack two 2x TCs to bring the space bird a bit closer.

At first I was really curious, spurred on by the '4x TC' in the title. Then I saw the photo and was totally blown away by what you can capture with 1600mm. Say this is a joke, before I get too impressed.

No Joke, just another Day in The LiquidStone Observatory!

Amazing Romy!,. I would never have expected to see anything other than a bright light.

That is an amazing shot there!

Amazing shot. Well done!
Thanks for posting
Frank

Thanks for the comments, Wilt, Jake, Eric and Frank!

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #10633704
No Joke, just another Day in The LiquidStone Observatory!

Amazing Romy!,. I would never have expected to see anything other than a bright light.

Lol, Jake..... I've been getting up way before sunrise to observe some very bright passes (-3 mag. or brighter) in the last couple of months. Each time I looked up, rainclouds were blocking the skies. This morning, luck smiled at me and gave me reasonable seeing conditions.

How easy/hard was it to spot? Did you pan with it or was the support locked down tight?

Nice work!

phreeky wrote in post #10634902
How easy/hard was it to spot? Did you pan with it or was the support locked down tight?

Nice work!

Once you know which part of the sky the ISS will come from (plus the time of appearance), you won't miss it. It's about as bright as Venus and streaks across the skies like a high altitude jet, traveling from horizon to horizon in about 4-5 minutes.

I usually look at http://www.heavens-above.com/ for the schedule of passes.

I manually pre-focused on the moon, then waited for the ISS to appear. I panned my rig to follow the ISS, shooting bursts as fast as my 1D4 buffer allows. I took over 100 shots this morning and just selected the sharpest ones.

Excellent capture, Romy!

Jason C

Jason C wrote in post #10636455
Excellent capture, Romy!

Jason C

Thanks, Jason!

Just knowing which settings to use is amazing.

Always amazing Romy!

And from now on whenever someone asks about getting the 2xTC and the naysayers come out of the woodwork, from now on all I'm gonna type is...

Romy.

I just sold my "spare" 2x... seems I might have found a use for it after all!

I think that's one of the sharpest ground-based shots of the ISS I've seen and perhaps the only one where a telescope wasn't used as the camera lens. Excellent shot!

This is so cool!!! Totally worth losing sleep over.