7 pass ISS
ISS multiple flyby, single composite of 7 passes;
July 2022 has been a fantastic month for International Space Station (ISS) passes over UK skies.
For this amazing photo/project I have tried to capture as many passes as possible from a single location (home). over the course of the month. Cloud had a say in that, as usual, but I have cherry picked the best flybys and put together in a single composite.
This amazing image is a multiple exposure of all the (clear sky) ISS passes starting on 14th July and finishing on 20th July. I didn't get clear skies every night, unfortunately but I have managed to capture 7 passes, shown as a multiple composite in a single image.
How did i do this?
Firstly the gear:
Olympus OM-1,
8mm pro fisheye lens
Tripod (located in same position in field all month).
So the first part of the planning was to choose a location in the field, at home, which would allow a good west to east horizon composition. It was set to point due South,
The next step was to capture as many ISS passes during July as possible, clear sky permitting. All the dates and times were pulled from the Heavens Above website (or app) - https://www.heavens-above.com
Each ISS flyby I will call a batch. For the first ISS pass on 14th July (2306 hrs) the camera was set up on the tripod and I waited until the ISS passed overhead. I had a few trial runs for each batch to ensure settings worked.
The setting I used :
f2.8, ISO250 and exposure times were 15s max (down to 1s, again depending on how light the sky was).
Live Composite mode.
For each ISS pass a number of long exposures - approx 15-20 were taken (or batch) which covered the entire flyby. I left the camera on tripod for a few days but had to remove once the 40C heatwave arrived! I then set up and removed the camera using the fixed tripod for each pass, each day.
To capture each batch of images I used the Olympus in-camera 'Live Composite' mode. This very handy facility captures multiple exposures and automatically stacks to produce a final composite image in-camera.
I used this Live Composite mode for every single ISS pass (batch).
Unfortunately cloud killed visibility for a number of days but on the whole it worked out well. The following days/passes were captured:-
14th July - 2306hrs
15th July - 0043hrs
15th July - 0043hrs
16th July - 0131hrs
16th July - 2306hrs
18th July - 2306hrs
20th July - 2306hrs
Once I had captured all of the images (batches) I brought them all together for post-processing. The first pass on the 14th was used as the baseline exposure (and where the ghostly shadows and artificial lighting was added - me walking around field with a torch on/off during the flyby). Some slight tweaking with the alignment was required due to continually removing camera from tripod.
The final image you see is a single image Multiple Exposure of ISS passes from 14th-20th July 2022.
It's fascinating to see the different trajectories as this wonderful piece of science flies unassuming over our heads each cycle.
