Tracking ISS at high magnification

I saw it with the naked eye a few times this summer, and it's cool to see it up close. Thanks OP.

US never went to the moon.

Yeah…okay.

Sure you did buddy, sure you did…

You saw an object roughly the size of a jumbo jet, approximately 235 miles beyond your own focal point, and at an altitude of 250 miles.

Dang man, you people are seriously messed up…

Nice work per the usual.

We've had a flat earth annoyance in chat.. maybe you can jump in sometime?

Cool!

What causes the ISS to flicker? Is it clouds?

So does the ISS have extensive radiation sheilding? Or is radiation not actually a thing in space?

Hey Astro, thanks for sharing! Could I trouble you for a bit of insight please? I live near Portsmouth, UK. A few weeks ago, we were seeing lights in the sky, not lots, only one at a time but in the space of half an hour, we were seeing easily 3-4 and that was occuring everyday in the evening. We do live on a flight path, the planes are easily identifiable because of the aviation lights and you can track them across the horizon with ease. These lights though are just bright white. They're not on the flight path and they're random in terms of the directions they're heading. They seem to vanish into space above the area we live (like I said, you can track a plane across the horizon). Not only that, these lights seem to be at a higher altitude. We even called out to one to flash and it did several times (that only happened once!). Now, I have flight tracker open and they definitely are not registering on the app, like I said, they dont have any aviation lights on. As mentioned I use flight tracker and all the planes we see come across the flight path do register. Theres only one I havent seen register and that was the police helicopter. But you could see the aviation lights and hear the engine. My question to you sir is what other apps can i use to rule out other possibilities to what we are seeing? By that i mean a satellite tracker or anything else that would register human activity in the space above. I'll emphasis again that the paths they take are random and can be from any direction whether that he north, south, east or west. Yeah, yeah, i probably sound crazy but help me out here. What other apps can i use to monitor activity above our head? Many thanks for your time!

I use SkySafari Pro, it has an extensive, though not exhaustive, satellite database. It should be pretty complete for naked eye bright satellites, except for classified satellites.

Yeah…okay.

Sure you did buddy, sure you did…

You saw an object roughly the size of a jumbo jet, approximately 235 miles beyond your own focal point, and at an altitude of 250 miles.

Dang man, you people are seriously messed up…

Excellent...

Yeah…okay.

Sure you did buddy, sure you did…

You saw an object roughly the size of a jumbo jet, approximately 235 miles beyond your own focal point, and at an altitude of 250 miles.

Dang man, you people are seriously messed up…

very soon from now (no dates), australians are going to test anti-privacy weapons in the form of lasers....

when you lose your equipment it means you imposed on others rights to privacy and you will tolerate this..


or walk here first. If you have the balls.


in between these times we are going to get on with life. Like the dirt here taught us how.

"It's easier to fool someone than it is to tell them they've been fooled"!

I tracked it myself. I've also measured its size, altitude and velocity.

Where is your evidence that I faked it?

very soon from now (no dates), australians are going to test anti-privacy weapons in the form of lasers....

when you lose your equipment it means you imposed on others rights to privacy and you will tolerate this..


or walk here first. If you have the balls.


in between these times we are going to get on with life. Like the dirt here taught us how.

Wow! Very nice.

Could better clarity be attained at higher altitudes?

Yeah, you would have less atmospheric distortion to deal with. On steady nights you can definitely pull out more detail, but those are not as common down at sea level Florida. On the other hand, I get to work on missions that launch to ISS, so the trade off is worth it.

No stars.

Yeah yeah
1) ISS is so bright that it makes the stars behind disappear.

2) The space station reflects light off the earth

3) space station is covered in hundreds of LEDs

4) I was shining a torch on the space station at the time

5) the sun reflects of space station even when it’s behind earth

6) I set camera focus on ISS and removed stars.

7) I am now about to make something else up

Thanks for proving you didn't watch the video. Watch the video. Yes, I captured a single bright star next to ISS.


Correction, ISS is so bright that it requires a fast exposure to properly expose the daylit surface of the station through a telescope. The exposure used for this video, once it was free of the clouds, was 1/2000s. Only the brightest stars visible to the naked eye can be seen in the telescope at that exposure, even at maximum ISO (the camera wasn't even maxed out on ISO).

That is not the principle source of lighting, no.

So?

You could point the most powerful laser at it you can get your hands on and the amount of reflected light that would reach my telescope from your laser would still be negligible. Particularly compared to the sunlight that it was in.

Wrong. The station passed through orbital sunrise moments before I started tracking it.

I focused on Rigel before I began tracking ISS, yet ISS was still in focus. How did that happen? ISS is beyond the hyperfocal distance of my telescope, as are the stars.
[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]

I'm sure you are, and I'm sure it will be just as inaccurate as this post I just debunked.