By Mary Umbricht | 2019-08-20
On 08/27/2019 11:37 am by John Nelson | Website | Puget Sound, Washington
I'm a happy camper today! I captured an image I've been after for years. I received notification last night from CalSky.com of an ISS/Sun transit that would be occurring today (27 August) at 11:37:57:00 over Puget Sound. The center-line for this event would be relatively close so, I packed up and headed out to put myself in the middle of the track-line. Fortunately today was a beautiful, cloudless day in the Pacific Northwest! I used an app called "Emerald Time" to keep close track of the time. This app shows hours, minutes, seconds and tenths of a second as tracked by the atomic clock in Colorado. Timing accuracy was very important. The ISS was moving at 7.68km/second (4.7 miles/sec) and the entire transit only lasted 0.85 seconds. Two seconds before the scheduled transit I opened the continuous shutter release at just under 5fps. Success! I captured two frames with the ISS silhouetted against the sun!
Nikon D810, Sigma 150-600mm lens with Sigma 1.4x teleconverter, remote (cable) shutter release, Thousand Oaks full aperture solar filter, remote (cable) shutter release, Oben tripod.
Minimal post processing (slight contrast modification) in Lightroom. Mostly to crop and export as .jpeg
The images were taken at 1/1600sec f/9 ISO 1000.