I present a short video, in 4K, of two video clips of the International Space Station in two successive passages across the sky on May 24/25, 2018.
The location was my backyard in southern Alberta.
The clips were shot in 4K in real-time video at 24 frames per second but with a 1/4-second shutter speed with a Sony a7III camera, and with 15mm full-frame fish-eye (first clip) and 8mm circular fish-eye lenses. ISO speeds were 6400 and 16,000.
The clips are sped up by 2x and 4X in post-production to make a shorter video for the web. The background sounds of the night are real-time and were recorded live with the videos.
What I cannot capture is the smell!
The lilacs were in bloom and lent a wonderful fragrant scent to the night air, which added to the sights and sounds of a spring night.
Thus the title of the video.
Much of North America is now enjoying great passes of the ISS. To find out when you can see it from your backyard see NASA’s Spot the Station website and enter your location.
October has brought clear skies and some fine celestial sights. Here’s a potpourri of what was up from home.
We’ve enjoyed some lovely early autumn weather here in southern Alberta, providing great opportunities to see and shoot a series of astronomical events.
Conjunctions
Venus and Mars in close conjunction in the dawn sky on October 5, 2017. Venus is the brightest object; Mars is below it; while the star above Venus is 4th magnitude Sigma Leonis. The foreground is illuminated by light from the setting Full Moon in the west. This is a single 1-second exposure with the 135mm lens at f/2 and Canon 60Da at ISO 800.
On October 5, Venus and Mars appeared a fraction of a degree apart in the dawn twilight. Venus is the brightest object, just above dimmer but red Mars. This was one of the closest planet conjunctions of 2017. Mars will appear much brighter in July and August 2018 when it makes its closest approach to Earth since 2003.
Satellites: The Space Station
An overhead pass of the ISS on October 5, 2017, with the Full Moon rising in the east at left. The ISS is moving from west (at right) to east (at left), passing nearly overhead at the zenith at centre. North is at the top, south at bottom in this fish-eye lens image with an 8mm Sigma fish-eye lens on the Canon 6D MkII camera. This is a stack of 56 exposures, each 4 seconds long at an interval of 1 second.
The Space Station made a series of ideal evening passes in early October, flying right overhead from my site at latitude 51° N. I captured it in a series of stacked still images, so it appears as a dashed line across the sky. In reality it looks like a very bright star, outshining any other natural star. Here, it appears to fly toward the rising Moon.
Satellites: Iridiums
A pair of nearly simultaneous and parallel Iridium satellite flares, on October 9, 2017, as they descended into the north. The left or westerly flare was much brighter and with a sharp rise and fall in brightness. While it was predicted to be mag. -4.4 I think it got much brighter, perhaps mag -7, but very briefly. These are Iridium 90 (left) and Iridium 50 (right). This is a stack of 40+ exposures each, 2 seconds at 1-second intervals, with the Sigma 24mm lens at f/1.4 and Nikon D750 at ISO 6400.
Often appearing brighter than even the ISS, Iridium satellite flares can blaze brighter than even Venus at its best. One did so here, above, in another time-lapse of a pair of Iridium satellites that traveled in parallel and flared at almost the same time. But the orientation of the reflective antennas that create these flares must have been better on the left Iridium as it really shot up in brilliance for a few seconds.
Auroras
A circumpolar star trail composite with Northern Lights, on October 13, 2017, shot from home in southern Alberta. The Big Dipper is at bottom centre; Polaris is at top centre at the axis of the rotation. The bottom edge of the curtains are rimmed with a pink fringe from nitrogen. This is a stack of 200 frames taken mostly when the aurora was a quiescent arc across the north before the substorm hit. An additional single exposure is layered in taken about 1 minute after the main star trail set to add the final end point stars after a gap in the trails. Stacking was with the Advanced Stacker Plus actions using the Ultrastreaks mode to add the direction of motion from the tapering trails. Each frame is 3 seconds at f/2 and ISO 6400 wth the Sigma 14mm lens and Nikon D750.
Little in the sky beats a fine aurora display and we’ve had several of late, despite the Sun being spotless and nearing a low ebb in its activity. The above shot is a composite stack of 200 images, showing the stars circling the celestial pole above the main auroral arc, and taken on Friday the 13th.
A decent aurora across the north from home in southern Alberta, on Friday the 13th, October, 2017, though these frames were taken after midnight MDT. 3 seconds at f/2 and ISO 6400 wth the Sigma 14mm lens and Nikon D750.
This frame, from some 1300 I shot this night, October 13, captures the main auroral arc and a diffuse patch of green above that pulsed on and off.
You can see the time-lapse here in my short music video on Vimeo.
Friday the 13th Aurora from Alan Dyer on Vimeo.
It’s in 4K if your monitor and computer are capable. It nicely shows the development of the aurora this night, from a quiescent arc, through a brief sub-storm outburst, then into pulsing and flickering patches. Enjoy!
What all these scenes have in common is that they were all shot from home, in my backyard. It is wonderful to live in a rural area and to be able to step outside and see these sites easily by just looking up!
The Space Station is now continuously lit by sunlight, allowing me to capture dusk-to-dawn passages of the ISS.
On the night of May 31/June 1 I was able to shoot four passages of the International Space Station on successive orbits, at 90-minute intervals, from dusk to dawn.
The first passage, at 11:06 p.m., was low across the south. It’s the image at top.
Then at 12:45 a.m. the Space Station came over again, now directly overhead. It’s the image above. The Moon is the bright glow at bottom.
One orbit later, at 2:21 a.m., the Station came over in another overhead pass in the bright moonlight.
The final passage of the night came at 3:55 a.m. as the sky was brightening with dawn twilight and the Moon was setting. This was another passage across the south, and made for the most photogenic pass of the night.
Here’s an edited movie of the four passes, with a little music just for fun.
Seeing the Space Station on not one but two, three, or even four orbits in one night is possible at my latitude of 50 degrees north around summer solstice because the Station is now continuously lit by sunlight — the Sun never sets from the altitude of the ISS.
When the ISS should be entering night, sunlight streaming over the north pole still lights the Station at its altitude of 400 km.
To shoot the time-lapse clips and stills I used 8mm and 15mm fish-eye lenses, and a 14mm ultra-wide lens.
The bright moonlight made it possible to use short 2- to 4-second exposures, allowing me to record enough frames at each passage to make the little movies of the ISS flying across the sky. Keep in mind, to the eye, the ISS looks like a bright star. Some image processing trickery adds the tapering trails.
I used the Advanced Stacker Actions from StarCircleAcademy.com to create the trail effects, and to stack the time-lapse frames into single composite still images. The gaps in the trails are from the one second interval between frames.
A couple of Perseid meteors streak across the moonlit sky above Mt. Cephren in Banff National Park.
The night before the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower was very clear for the first couple of hours. On Monday, August 11, I positioned myself at the shore of Lower Waterfowl Lake, at a roadside viewpoint on the Icefields Parkway in Banff National Park, Alberta.
I had two cameras going, one on a fixed tripod aimed west in hope of catching some meteors in a few frames. Two did, and the main image is a composite of those two frames, as the Perseids shoot over the pyramid peak of Mt. Cephren.
Later, the Space Station also flew over, accompanied by the European ATV cargo ship, captured here in a stack of 18 frames from the 555-frame time-lapse, showing their pass from west to east (bottom to top) of the composite image. The gaps are from when the shutter was closed for 1 second between the 15-second-long exposures with the 14mm ultra-wide lens.
In all, it was a warm and beautiful night, with the normally busy viewpoint all to myself all night, under the light of the nearly Full Moon.
The Space Station flies over a campground of astronomers awaiting the fall of darkness.
Last night was the main night for summer star parties, being a dark-of-the-Moon Saturday in August. As I usually am each year, I was in Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan, attending the annual Saskatchewan Summer Star Party. About 330 attended this year, a near record year.
The night was partly cloudy but stayed clear enough for long enough to allow great views. As the sky was getting dark the International Space Station flew over from horizon to horizon, west to east, passing nearly overhead. I had a camera and ultra-wide lens ready and caught the pass in 10 exposures, each 30 seconds long, here stacked in Photoshop. The accumulated exposure time also makes the stars trail in circles around the North Star at upper right.
It was one of many fine sky sights hundreds of stargazers enjoyed this weekend at the SSSP, and no doubt at dozens of other star parties around the continent this weekend.
It was a marvellous night for Space Station watching.
Right now those of us at northern latitudes in North America are enjoying the opportunity to see the International Space Station come over not once but often 2 or 3 times a night, as it is now lit by the Sun all night long (on our nights down here on Earth, that is).
Here are two shots from the night of June 4-5, 2013 taken from my home in Alberta at a latitude of 51° North.
My featured image above is from the ISS pass that began at 1:55 am, and is a stack of 4 tracked 2.5-minute exposures, so the stars are not trailed, but the ground is! On this pass, the ISS came overhead. This view is looking north, toward the all-night perpetual twilight we see on the Canadian Prairies around summer solstice. There’s also a low band of green aurora on the northern horizon.
I shot the image below on the ISS’s pass one orbit earlier at 12:18 am. This image is looking south to the ISS’s high pass across the south. It’s a composite of 4 untracked 2-minute exposures – thus the stars are now trailing in circles around Polaris at the top of the frame.
Both shots are horizon-to-horizon all-sky views with an 8mm fish-eye lens.
The sky isn’t dark, even in the shot taken at 2 am. At this time of year around summer solstice at northern latitudes, the sky never gets astronomically dark but is lit a deep blue by sunlight still streaming over the pole and bathing the night in a glow of perpetual twilight.
Commander Chris Hadfield and his crew fly over my house and below the Moon on a spring night in Canada.
It’s been a couple of months since we in Canada have had a chance to sight the Space Station in our evening sky with our Canadian astronaut on board. When I last had a chance in February, Chris was a crew member. Now he’s the commander of the Station, the first Canadian to hold the position.
My shot, taken tonight on the second of two passes this evening, has the Space Station coming up out of the west and rising to meet the Moon. It passed under the Moon and then faded out as it entered Earth’s shadow and nighttime, one of 16 nights they experienced this and every day in orbit around the Earth.
Chris is in orbit with the Expedition 35 crew until mid-May. So this may be our best and last chance to see our astronaut flying through Canadian skies.
This was also the first decently clear night we’ve had in two weeks, since my last post from April 2. We all hope spring is finally arriving
Tonight the Space Station flew out of the west and overhead as it faded into the shadow of the Earth.
Because tonight the ISS was coming up high into the north, almost directly overhead, I used a fish-eye lens to shoot the entire sky, and took three exposures, each 90 seconds with the camera tracking the stars.
The bright Moon is at right, but despite its light the Milky Way still shows up. The Space Station faded into sunset just as it crossed the Milky Way.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is on board, about to take command at the next crew change. He’s been tweeting lots of comments and photos from space. Check him out at @Cmdr_Hadfield.
Here’s looking back at you Commander Hadfield! Here is our Canadian astronaut sailing into the Milky Way.
Since he launched to the International Space Station in December Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been tweeting many photos of places in Canada that he sees passing by his window 400 kilometres below. With the Space Station now entering our evening sky in western Canada, I can return the favour and photograph his home in space traveling among the stars. This night he flew through Orion and into the winter Milky Way.
This was the scene Sunday night, February 10, in a pass of the Space Station low across the south starting at 7:14 p.m. MST. The exposure was four minutes, long enough to just capture the entire pass from west to east, right to left in this image. At left, the trail of the Space Station fades out as the ISS entered Earth’s shadow and into night.
The image also captures the Milky Way at left and the Zodiacal Light rising from the last vestiges of blue twilight at right. Jupiter is the brightest object above centre. For the next two weeks we’ll be enjoying nightly passes of the ISS with our Canadian astronaut on board.
This was the view Friday night, August 19, 2011, as the International Space Station flew over Banff, Alberta and the Canadian Rockies.
I took this shot (actually this is a composite of three successive exposures) from the viewpoint on Mt. Norquay overlooking the Banff townsite and the Trans-Canada Highway interchange, unfortunately all too well lit. This might well be a case study in light pollution as well.
But the lights in the valley don’t diminish the Milky Way above, and the sky-wide streak created by the passage from west to east of the Space Station. What looks like a brilliant star to the eye turns into a streak here due to the three 45-second time exposures I used to capture this scene. The lens is the 8mm fish-eye, and these frames are from a 400-frame time-lapse movie for the planetarium dome.
Here’s a capture of the Space Station, coming over in a darker, clearer sky than last night’s shot (in the previous blog). This was June 22, 2011, a fine solstice night on the Canadian Prairies.
The time was just before midnight, with no Moon. Yet the sky is blue and the northern horizon tinged with the orange glow of twilight. It never gets truly dark now, as summer begins. To the right, on the northeast horizon, a low green aurora kicks up.
The Space Station, the dashed arc at top, tonight passed from west to southeast, across the southern sky at the top of this fisheye 360° frame.
This is a stack of 28 18-second exposures at f/4 and ISO 1600 with the Canon 5D MkII and Sigma 8mm lens.
We’re currently enjoying a series of nightly (and often twice or thrice nightly) passes of the International Space Station, coinciding with the bright nights of summer solstice.
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I took this shot on the night of solstice, June 21, 2011, as the Space Station came directly overhead, flying out of the west then heading off into the east. So we’re looking a little west of north here, toward the bright northern horizon. Pity some light cloud hazed up the sky. The pass began at 11:12 pm so the sky was still quite bright, though even an hour or two later at this time of year the northern horizon is tinged with perpetual twilight glow, at least at my latitude of 51° N.
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To create the image I took a series of 100 3-second exposures (as long as the bright sky would allow) taken 1 second apart in rapid-fire fashion with the camera firing automatically with a remote timer. The 1 second gap between exposures creates the gaps in the Space Station trail.
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I processed the images in Adobe Camera Raw, and exported them all as TIFFs to their own folder. I then used Chris Schur’s excellent “Star Trails” Photoshop Action to stack all those images into one composite image showing the complete flight of the Space Station across the sky. A little application of Shadows and Highlights helped bring out the foreground and bright sky detail.
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I used the Sigma 8mm fisheye lens and Canon 5D Mk II to capture the whole sky, for a still and time-lapse sequence suitable for projection in a full-dome video planetarium … because the neat thing about this method is that the same set of images can be strung together sequentially (using Photoshop Extended’s Movie function) into a time-lapse movie of the pass, showing cloud and star motion as well as the ISS passage. The same techniques work for star trails, as indeed you can see here with the stars of the northern sky (Big Dipper at left and Cassiopeia at right) trailing around the North Star.
What a picture perfect pass this was, on Easter Sunday evening, April 24, 2011. The International Space Station (ISS) rose out of the west right on time, passed almost directly overhead, the flew off to the east, fading out just as it approached the horizon. The sky was a deep blue in the late twilight, with the spring stars beginning to appear. As it usually does, the Space Station outshone them all, including Arcturus, the brightest streak at right. The Station also passed just north of the handle of the Big Dipper at the top of the frame.
I took this with the 15mm lens that takes in a field of view from the horizon to almost straight up.
Because the sky was still bright, one long exposure wouldn’t work with this shot. The Station took nearly 3 minutes to traverse the frame. The only way to avoid overexposing the sky would have been to stop the lens way down or use a very slow ISO speed, either of which would have meant the Station and stars might not have recorded very well, especially the fast-moving Station.
So instead, I used what turned out to be thirteen short 15-second exposures at f/4 and ISO 400, taken 1 second apart. Each one is exposed correctly, and the aperture and ISO speed are fast enough to pick up stars and the moving satellite. The trick is to then stack the images in Photoshop. To do this I import the images first from the memory card using Adobe Bridge, then process them in Adobe Camera Raw. ACR provides most of the processing necessary for shots like these – sharpening, noise reduction, some contrast boost, and the usual Vibrance and Clarity. Once processed, I use Bridge’s “Import into Photoshop Layers” command to automatically create a single image with all the processed frames stacked on top of each other in layers. Then it’s a matter of turning the Blend mode of each layer from Normal to Lighten, and voila! – the frames turn transparent and appear merged together, all properly exposed. The result is a single exposure effectively 3 minutes long, long enough that the stars also trail.
In this shot, the 1-second interval between exposures creates the gaps in the ISS trail. I could do a little Photoshop trickery to eliminate those but I think they give a sense of the speed of the ISS as it flies overhead quite quickly when it is closest, then slows down in apparent motion as it flies away into the distance.
A great help in planning a shot like this is Starry Night software – it loads in the latest satellite orbit data and shows the exact path of the satellite across your local sky. So I was ready and waiting with the camera all framed up, knowing just where it would appear, then started the camera firing as the ISS came overhead and into the field of the camera. It was a fine sight on an Easter Sunday.
The Amazing Sky 