Three Legged Flares

A fine night again, although given how late it's getting dark at the moment, not really much opportunity to use the scope, especially with needing to get up for work. Still, I had the possibility of 3 Iridium Flares last night. I setup the 450d on the SatCatcher set at 20 seconds, f5.6 @ISO400, zoomed to 55mm on the kit lens. Manual Focus (I switched off the IS too, not a lot of point tripod mount). Used the 2 second self timer to allow any motion to settle, I don't have a remote yet.

First up Mag -2 Iridium 95. 2234



About 15 minutes later Mag -0 Iridium 31 2252


After catching these two, I went back inside as the sky was still bright, and I had some things to finish off. I got back out about 2330 with the SatCatcher and the bins. I setup the camera ready for the next flare at 0009 and had a trawl around the sky with the bins. Again, I felt the astonishment of the quantity of stars that could be seen. As I was panning slowly around, I stumbled across a patch of stars that, despite the odd orientation (been a while since I saw them last) looked like Mel111. So I swung the camera around and snapped off 20, 20 second frames. I'm having some issues with getting DSS to stack the frames and I don't know why. I've managed to get around the memory errors, but now it'll only stack one frame.

Anyway, I ran one frame throught Noels tools LP removal, and this is what came out.



I'm impressed with that for only 20 seconds.

Then as the time was fast approaching for the next and last flare of the night, I set up the SatCatcher and this is what I caught.

Mag -4 Iridium 19 0009


This too was run through Noels LP removal tool. The 450d just does so much of a better job than the Z2. It's a shame as the Z2 is a good camera, but it's gonna have to be relegated to spare status.