An Iridium 7 satellite flare, imaged on the morning of 5th November 2005 (04:35UT) at Derby, by Chris Newsome. Chris comments: "This was a mag -8 flare, the central track being approximately 1.6 km to the east of my observing
site on the (south-east side of Derby). The azimuth was 199 degrees, the altitude was 34 degrees. It was imaged on a Canon EOS300D DSLR with a
22mm lens, piggybacked on a driven Celestron C6-N (CG-4 mount), a 30 second exposure at 800ASA without a light pollution filter. The raw image
from the camera was converted to 16-bit TIFF, and dark subtracted in K3CCDTools V2 and processed in Photoshop CS2 (curves, RGB levels) and then
converted to JPEG format. The single image was one of a set of 10 that was taken using the automated sequence in DSLRFocus but after stacking
Chris found that the single frame that captured the flare gave the most interesting picture due to the heavy processing it required. The
stacked image was very two dimensional, clean and flat where as the processed single image gave a lot of depth to the image from the foreground
(the OTA is on the left of the image) through the middle distance (the trees on the lower section of the image, partially obscuring Orion)
through to the sky at infinity. The single image also emphasised the warmth from the glow of the sodium street lights and the coldness of the
sky." This image
made Picture Of The
Week on the British Astronomical Association (BAA)
website on the 14th September 2005.
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