20 November 2020 Int'l Space Station Middle Tennessee Flyover

Yesterday afternoon, my wife showed me a tweet from Dyer Observatory, an astronomical observatory associated with Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

The tweet described a highly visible flyover of the International Space Station yesterday evening. We had no clouds and a little over an hour before the event! Fortunately, dinner prep was almost at the "let it simmer on it's own" stage, so we wouldn't have to tend it while we were in the field behind our house, eyes to the sky.

About 15 minutes before showtime, we went outside with binoculars and camera. No need for either, because seeing an object silently sliding across the sky is kind of amazing, but we figured we'd try the camera and binoculars to preserve the moment and get a closer view.

Our camera and image editing skills are decidedly on the amateur end of the spectrum, but here are the results. Actually, my wife took better shots than I did, because I kept adjusting focus to accommodate attempts to zoom in a bit. Lessons learned for next time.

Here is where, in a matter of less than ten seconds, I got things out of focus.

And then it appeared to vanish.

See you next time, ISS! Many thanks to Dyer Observatory for the tweet. I've had my head elsewhere, lately, and was very glad for getting redirected. My wife and I are looking forward to next time.

Administrivia

• Camera: Nikon D3400; Lens: AF-P Nikkor 18-55mm 1:3.5-5.6 G, Format: RAW (NEF)
• Software: darktable 2.6.0 and Inkscape 0.92 (my first time editing an SVG, for the watermark!)
• Laptop: Purism Librem 15 running PureOS
• Aperture priority; for better or worse, I cap iso at 12800
• All timestamps are US Central Time, UTC-6.
• Very much noob.
• All images in this post Copyright Clark Everetts, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International CC BY-SA 4.0