Saturday 29 January 2022

ISS transit of the Moon! And flat-earthers...

A lunar transit of the International Space Station is something I've wanted to capture for a long, long time. It's difficult in the UK as clear skies are hard to come by, especially, it seems, when you want them most. Using an online ISS tracker, I knew that there was an opportunity to capture such an event quite close to home, so lots of planning later and I was all ready to go on the 19th of January.

The ISS passed in front of the Moon at approx 22:54, with the transit lasting close to 1 second. Yes, 1 second. You can imagine why this type of thing takes a lot of planning, as well as very careful execution.

I videoed the transit on 2 cameras (1 main, 1 backup), and made the image stacks from the footage, as well as from some stills taken just after the pass. It was a 96% moon on the night, but I decided to blend it with an image of the 100% full moon from 2 nights prior, to give it a nice 3D type feel. Not something I've tried previously, but it does make this final image feel more complete.


It's not very often a shoot ends with this sort of feeling, but all the prep and effort paid off.




Colour data was enhanced in post-processing for aesthetic purposes, but the colours here are naturally occurring. ISS positions are accurate and to scale, made from the 25 frames in the video that the ISS appeared in. To ensure each image of the ISS was sharp, I opted for a shutter speed of 1/2000s for the video. This was an educated guess as I've not attempted this before, but physics, maths & photography are kind of my thing(s), so I knew that this would do the job fairly well.

Here's the video footage, played at real-time speed, half speed and quarter speed:





Something I didn't consider at the time was just how triggered FLAT-EARTHERS would be by my night's work. I had one 'interesting' comment on my Facebook post, then another, and another in quick succession, so I soon realised that my post must have been shared somewhere a bit, shall we say, 'out there'. A bit of detective work from my good lady and we found the offending Facebook group, a 'flat-earth' group. It seems the ISS is a real problem for their 'movement' as it's one of the few things they can't provide any remotely conceivable explanation for.

I didn't find the comments annoying. In fact, the extent of delusion was so extraordinary that the comments were highly entertaining!

You're a NASA shill!
You work for NASA!
You're pushing lies for the government!
ISS is fake!
Earth is flat!
ISS is only the size of a football field, you can't see it at 250 miles!
It's the wrong size compared to a plane in front of the moon!
It was a modified plane!
The moon is really close to us inside the dome!
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.

I'm grateful for the laughs, so thanks to them for that! In fairness, the number of flat-earthers that I attracted was low as the images will have been seen by millions across the various platforms. But still, concerning nonetheless... 😂


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