International Space Station Solar Transit
My first attempt last week was a complete washout ... actually had the wrong day. But today ... success! To actually see this happening in real time is nothing short of amazing!
It begins with using this ISS transit finder website: transit-finder.com/. That will give you all the possible transits in your area for approximately a month. Each one is represented with what looks like a red highway. The median line is where the ISS will transit the sun on its diagonal. Anywhere left or right of the red line the transit will take place on a chord ... not the diagonal. Outside the red area ... you won't see the transit.
Then one has to use the map and a GPS unit to find a good place to go and set up to record the transit.
To do that I use a solar telescope and an astronomical camera attached to a computer. (Never look at the sun without protection for your eyes!) A minute or so before the transit is due to begin, I start recording a video that overlaps the transit time.
This is a single frame from that video. There were actually only seven frames taken today as it crossed the solar disk ... it really whizzes past quickly! ).It took only 0.87 seconds today. Sometimes the transit takes a little longer ... but only a matter of a few seconds at the slowest, really.
I can actually see the space between the solar panels. (Click on the image to zoom in) Since the ISS was 572.02 kilometers above me as this was taken, that's not too bad! The sun, of course, is 149.6 million kilometers from earth!
My next upload is a crop of this image.
International Space Station Solar Transit
My first attempt last week was a complete washout ... actually had the wrong day. But today ... success! To actually see this happening in real time is nothing short of amazing!
It begins with using this ISS transit finder website: transit-finder.com/. That will give you all the possible transits in your area for approximately a month. Each one is represented with what looks like a red highway. The median line is where the ISS will transit the sun on its diagonal. Anywhere left or right of the red line the transit will take place on a chord ... not the diagonal. Outside the red area ... you won't see the transit.
Then one has to use the map and a GPS unit to find a good place to go and set up to record the transit.
To do that I use a solar telescope and an astronomical camera attached to a computer. (Never look at the sun without protection for your eyes!) A minute or so before the transit is due to begin, I start recording a video that overlaps the transit time.
This is a single frame from that video. There were actually only seven frames taken today as it crossed the solar disk ... it really whizzes past quickly! ).It took only 0.87 seconds today. Sometimes the transit takes a little longer ... but only a matter of a few seconds at the slowest, really.
I can actually see the space between the solar panels. (Click on the image to zoom in) Since the ISS was 572.02 kilometers above me as this was taken, that's not too bad! The sun, of course, is 149.6 million kilometers from earth!
My next upload is a crop of this image.