CSS Moon Transit 11/02

The Tiangong Chinese Space Station transiting the moon on 11/02 just after 10am, taken at 500mm from my back yard in Mansfield.

40 shots in 4 seconds - the Station was only covering the moon for 1.3 seconds. Distance to the station from my location was approximately 445 miles. It was moving bottom right to top left.

There was quite a bit of atmospheric distortion that could be seen shot-to-shot, but it cleaned up ok.

I used a website called ISS Transit Finder that shows transits for the ISS, the CSS, and the Hubble.
https://transit-finder.com

This was my first time trying a fast transit shot (I did shoot a few eclipse photos last month), so I'm very happy with the results. There isn't any wiggle room on the timing, it's down to the second. The thing is moving way too fast to mess around so you have to be completely set up and ready so you can watch your phone's clock.



Here's a single shot at full size:

I tried a different compositing program and got a much better result. Same set of images. Photoshop isn't always the best at alignment.

Amazing, thanks for sharing...

Cool pics! What are the dots going across the the moon?

That's the Chinese space station. It's 1/2 the size of the ISS, so it's too small to resolve any shape with the lens I was using. And it was reflecting the sun anyway, so it just shows as a white dot.

As it flew by, I shot 40 shots in 4 seconds, so each dot shows its position 1/10 of a second apart. The 40 images were stacked (or composited you could say) to make the final image showing the path of the CSS in front of the moon.

Wow, thats an amazing photo!

Ive always wanted to get into astrophotography but Ive got enough expensive hobbies jaja

Thanks, Gooey - and welcome to the TFF

There's an old photographer's saying: Get your kids hooked on photography and they'll never be able to afford drugs!

Awesome, how does one know the objects ID ?

If you go to this website: https://transit-finder.com
Enter your Lat/Lon and it will tell you all the upcoming transits that can be seen from nearby your location, and what the object is. It shows both sun and moon transits.

For my location, there are two more Tiangong moon transits and two Hubble sun transits coming up. They're just predictions, you have to re-check it within a couple of hours of the transit time because it can change.

You can use https://theskylive.com to see where the sun or moon will be in the sky at any future date/time for your location.

There are a few other websites that you can also use to track pretty much any visible satellite, such as https://www.n2yo.com/

Very cool