The Dutch Observatory

Tonight, November 20th, was the third night in a row that I observed the ISS when it flew over our area. Jon Wood decided to go to CE and I joined him. I have tried several times to capture the ISS on previous flybys but never managed to get a close up. The star trail images were as close as I got….. until today.

After many failed attempts, finally a closer image.  Exposure is a problem because of the direct reflection of the sun on the Shuttle, but I am pretty happy with the result of this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour docked on the ISS. Today is also the 10th aniversary of the International Space Station.  And while I took this image, an EVA was in progress and spacewalkers Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper and Shane Kimbrough were working on the starboard solar alpha rotary joint. Click on the image below for a larger picture, or Click here for a short movie with all 31 images of the flyby.

I’ve put some of the images taken of Jupiter from April until the middle of November and created this composite showing Jupiter as it appeared in 2008.  When put in context with each other it becomes very visible when the images are not processed the same.  This year was focussed on making improvements in capturing and the way I process images and get a basic understanding of the overall color balance.  So next year I will need to focus more on getting a unifirm color balance in all images.  We’ll see how I do on that!