This one is a shaggy-dog story and a half. I will attempt to make sense of the whole episode.
It was probably March 16th 2025 around 8:00 p.m. (I didn’t make a note) that I went outside to have a look at the sky. It was fairly clear but a fair few patches of cloud were around. As I looked almost overhead there was the space station (ISS) passing over, a nice long pass of at least 6-minutes I would guess. But then as the ISS was about to disappear towards the east there was another bright object following in its path maybe just a minute or 2 behind. I couldn’t believe it – it was Elon Musk’s Space X Dragon capsule about to relieve Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from their extended ISS stay! I had no idea that this was going on and it was pure fluke I was outside at this time to witness it. Both passes were however on NASA’s “Spot the Station” website with the time in agreement with what I’d seen. I was also pretty furious at missing this superb photo-opportunity because at 8:00 p.m. the sky was nice and dark, and I could have held the shutter open for the duration of the passes. Still at least I had it in wetware memory.
I was still furious about missing this historic event the next day as well, but the day after, the 18th March, the SpaceX capsule was on the News as they were about to detach from the ISS and return home. Could I save the situation and actually get images of the ISS and the SpaceX capsule on the night of the 18th? I should say at this point that there was no entry for the SpaceX capsule’s return when I looked at the NASA site on the 16th – but – when I checked the site again on the 18th – there it was!! The only problem was that the SpaceX capsule pass would be at a couple of minutes before 7 p.m. GMT, with the ISS pass coming along some 15-minutes later, and the sky was still fairly bright that early in the evening. This is a nuisance as it means you have to grab the passes in short exposures as a long exposure will wipe out the passes due to too much skyglow. In addition (just to make things worse) the SpaceX pass was fairly low down in the murk in the south, which combined with the much dimmer appearance of SpaceX (compared to the ISS) and the skyglow – would make this a VERY difficult capture. All this was a much more difficult capture than the more ideal passes of the 16th where it was not only much darker, but both the ISS and SpaceX were also nearly overhead, following the same path, which would have resulted in a much better photo. Never mind.
So I set up the Canon 5D MkII in “bulb” mode, ISO 100 and f#2.8 with a Canon 15mm fish-eye lens ready to capture SpaceX first. In the SpaceX image West is to the right and you can see the 11 exposures capturing the SpaceX pass over to the left (East) in the lower half of the frame. I didn’t get the earlier passage of SpaceX more to the West simply because I didn’t spot it as it was too dim to see with the background skyglow. Note that the tree you see on the right in this image is the same tree you see on the right in the ISS pass – this gives you some idea of the huge difference in elevation between the two passes. From memory I believe the SpaceX pass was around 12 degrees, whereas the ISS pass was around 78 degrees. Some 15-minutes later the ISS came over and you can see the 6 (longer) exposures I took of the ISS. But even the usually very bright ISS is pretty washed out in the rightmost (West) image as you can see, due to the skyglow. But at least I had captured both and was at least a little less furious about losing the passes 2-days ago.
But then there was a further setback. When I looked at the SpaceX data, the capsule was incredibly dim and I couldn’t create even a half decent image of the pass. I was down in the dumps again. Had I missed the photo-opportunity of a lifetime for a second time? Fortunately not as my friend Noel Carboni, Photoshop practitioner extraordinaire came to the rescue and created the top image (of the 2) that you see above.
And that concludes the LONG story of what went into creating those 2 images 🙂
