ISS and the ATV

It was clearish last night, the change in the clocks from GMT to BST threw things out somewhat, but I checked on Heavens Above for the pass of the ISS and the ATV and they were scheduled to be nice and high and only 2 minutes apart. Excellent thought I, and about 10 minutes before hand, wrapped up, set the camera on the tripod and grabbed my bins.

Whilst I was waiting I took a look around. Orion was still quite high in the sky, so I started with M42. Not a lot to see, a little disappointing. The sisters were nearby, so I swung around and had a look at them for a few minutes.

Then back to scanning for that fast moveing dot. Ah there she is, just coming up into the night sky. The camera was all lined up and ready to go, so I watched and waited, and hit the shutter button. I then watched the ISS in the bins. Hard to track, and hard to see clearly, but there's definite evidence of shape. I knocked on the window and my wife came and had a look. She was clearly unimpressed and was only interested in whether I could tell if it wasn't a plane. To avoid getting into a long discussion, I just said yes, I can tell. I continued to track with the bins, and was surprised when it passed in front of a patch of close and tight stars. I didn't stop to check, but kept on the ISS. After the ISS pass was over, I went back and the ISS had tried to stir up the bees in the hive, by dashing across M44. Excellent.

Then the ATV passed over, this was much dimmer, and I didn't bother with the bins, as I figured it was so much smaller. I caught this on camera too, but it's hard to see. Then I went indoors again. There were some clouds around interfering with the views and I had some things to do. Later I processed the images :

ISS


ATV


Then combined them in DSS to see if I could show the track of both and how close together they are. This worked well, but I couldn't reduce the noise any as it removed the track of the ATV as it's so dim.