Atlantis and ISS captured from the ground... in broad daylight!

Awesome video! You did a great job!
Good luck with your next one, hope to see it also.
S&F

reply to post by ngchunter


That's awesome..... I've seen ISS and the Space Shuttle at night but never daytime... Two Thumbs Waaay Up :-)

Originally posted by JRCrowley

Originally posted by Troofseeker

Originally posted by ngchunter
I'm pretty excited this worked as well as it did. There were not going to be any decent night time passes of ISS or the shuttle during the final mission from my location, so I attempted to capture it this morning instead. I've never succeeded in directly capturing ISS during the day like this. You can see the white shape of Atlantis and the black spot of its engine compartment at the top of the image when ISS first appears.

Amazing footage, you should be really proud. However if the object you filmed was saucer or cigar-shaped, most here would be calling you a liar and calling CGI.

If it was CGI, then they would be correct to call it CGI.

The problem with UFOs in general is that, no, there are not any (known) real, true, actual UFO videos that look quite like this video.

And what exactly would qualify for a "real, true, actual UFO video" in your mind? What would it take for you to view a UFO video and say it was "real, true, and actual"? Have you ever seen such a video?

reply to post by ngchunter


hmm...looks like some swamp gas getting trapped in a thermal pocket reflecting the light from venus.

Just kidding...that's pretty freaking awesome!!!

Originally posted by Chadwickus
Nice vid.

Without going off topic too much, how did you go with capturing the Nanosail-D from a few months ago?

I caught "an" image of it, but it's low magnification and not that great. That thing's the hardest satellite I've ever tracked; my tracking software doesn't account for either the solar radiation pressure nor the atmospheric drag, so unless the orbital elements are less than about 12 hours old, the tracking is way, way off (for any other satellite I can get away with that). There's no other satellite like it up there right now.

Unfortunately, it was launched alongside a classified payload, so NORAD doesn't provide the elements. The university behind the project does, but the frequency of their updates and the age of the updated elements themselves by the time they release them leaves a lot to be desired. I've only been able to get fresh elements just before a pass just once, and I barely caught the satellite for a few seconds as I fought with the tracking. The thought has occured to me to artifically "update" the elements myself by pre-calculating the amount of expected drag and solar radiation pressure, but the calculations require knowledge of a few variables whose values are unknown to me. I would need to know the albedo and the attitude of the sail during the entire period from the epoch of the elements to the moment tracking starts. I can take an educated guess at the former but the latter is not well known.

reply to post by ngchunter


I got butterflies watching it! I'm glad to hear you get something out of it (other than documentation of course) too. I hope some form of regular, publicly viewable space flight will become routine again in the not too distant future. It's somehow sad knowing the Shuttle won't be going up anymore.

thanks, that was outstanding! I wonder if you had a bigger telescope, and a more sensitive tracking device for your telescope if you could see even more detail through seeing it closer. To see an astronaut's space suit, and make out the form of a human shape near a mammoth of a structure orbiting...wow. Great video

This is a really cool video. At first I thought you meant Atlantis as in the ancient floating city !

reply to post by ngchunter


If you take a good look at your avatar picture, you'll notice that its not the ISS at all but actually an IMPERIAL STAR DESTROYER and not one, but TWO TIE FIGHTERS coming towards us!

The geeks were right....

Cool pic though.

reply to post by ngchunter


Hey man I looked over the thread. Great thread and video.


I was wondering where you are from?

Wow! i'm always looking up at satellites at night going over but i've never seen anything like this during the day.

Thanks for sharing.

Nice video,thanks OP.

Suprised me that you seen it so clearly in broad daylight,looks pretty close as well considering how clearly you can see it.

CHeers

I thought it would be fun to compare the original real footage with a cgi...enjoy!!

Real Deal


Old friend TFH who brought you "the secret Mars Mission"


Peace

Reminds me of this image of the Columbia taken by Kirtland AFB's Starfire Optical range just minutes before it's destruction in 2003.


Kirtland AFB, Starfire

I remember just a couple years ago hearing about the ISS and shuttle (don't remember which one) would be flying over at dusk and we went outside to watch it. The website we looked up gave exact time, compass direction, and angle from the horizon, and sure enough there they were. (Marietta, GA, USA) It was cool and lasted about I don't know maybe 60 - 90 seconds. It was cool.

Yours is way better.

Really cool.

Originally posted by letthereaderunderstand
I thought it would be fun to compare the original real footage with a cgi...enjoy!!

TFH does a good job, but his station is flying with the wrong attitude, the solar panels are blue (he fixed that later), and just looks too "clean" for lack of a better word. A stacked image or series of images might look that good if you have perfect optics and seeing, but the real life situation is rarely that perfect (Legault comes the closest I've seen to that kind of perfection). There's a certain characteristic to raw footage, particularly when it's been captured by an analog camera (mine was a modified security CCD which has an analog output that I digitally capture). I'm not sure how much is contributed by the way the light interacts with imperfect optics/optical alignment, or the way the camera converts the CCD readout to an analog signal, but it just looks messy relative to CG. The difficulty with realistic CG is recreating the imperfections of real life. I'm sure though in 10-20 years when such realism is recreated with ease and everyone can do it without thinking, yet we still don't have a reusable space shuttle, that people will claim the shuttle was a hoax and people like me were in on it.

Anyway, wish me luck, I'm going to try to capture the shuttle one last time tomorrow morning at sunrise as it flies by itself. It will probably be the last time a telescope resolves an image of the space shuttle in orbit (unless Legault pulls a last minute surprise ).

Awe!

I had no idea this could be done! I remember tracking guide stars to compensate for inexact polar alignment, just to get a nebula shot-- to track something moving that fast seem like magic!

Thank you. Almost two minutes of eye-candy.

Well, no luck on this morning's attempt; the shuttle appears to be too dim to show up in the viewfinder in the morning light when it's flying by itself. This video is probably the last video to telescopically track and resolve the space shuttle in orbit.

Originally posted by ngchunter

Originally posted by letthereaderunderstand
I thought it would be fun to compare the original real footage with a cgi...enjoy!!

TFH does a good job, but his station is flying with the wrong attitude, the solar panels are blue (he fixed that later), and just looks too "clean" for lack of a better word. A stacked image or series of images might look that good if you have perfect optics and seeing, but the real life situation is rarely that perfect (Legault comes the closest I've seen to that kind of perfection). There's a certain characteristic to raw footage, particularly when it's been captured by an analog camera (mine was a modified security CCD which has an analog output that I digitally capture). I'm not sure how much is contributed by the way the light interacts with imperfect optics/optical alignment, or the way the camera converts the CCD readout to an analog signal, but it just looks messy relative to CG. The difficulty with realistic CG is recreating the imperfections of real life. I'm sure though in 10-20 years when such realism is recreated with ease and everyone can do it without thinking, yet we still don't have a reusable space shuttle, that people will claim the shuttle was a hoax and people like me were in on it.

Anyway, wish me luck, I'm going to try to capture the shuttle one last time tomorrow morning at sunrise as it flies by itself. It will probably be the last time a telescope resolves an image of the space shuttle in orbit (unless Legault pulls a last minute surprise

).

Good luck!!

I wasn't implying yours was CGI. I just thought since some people were stating that it was, that it would be nice to have some comparative footage to differentiate the difference between the real deal and a CGI. I agree that TFH does do a rather amazing job...heck he had people fooled here that we had performed a mission to mars with nothing more than some static images and some stock footage of the journey to the moon.

Thanks again for your work. I look forward to more.

Peace