Less than a second

Everything came together

A few days ago this wasn’t even a plan. The moon was up, nearly full, and the forecast promised clear skies. Then, by chance, I came across a reel of the International Space Station crossing the moon. Curious, I opened ISS Transit Finder. Two transits near me on the same Thursday morning. One of them, at 5:41:10, would pass just a few kilometres from my front door.

You go

Here, the sky is usually cloudy. Now there was a nearly full moon, and the ISS would fly right across it. You don’t think twice about that. You go.

The test

Then came the planning: photos or video, with or without a teleconverter. The evening before, I ran a test with the 800mm and no converter, filming 4K at 120 frames per second. At that frame rate the Nikon can use a 2.3x crop without losing 4K resolution. It turned out to be the best setup: the whole moon in frame, so I would catch the station coming in and going out.

Clouds, maybe rain

It was still nerve-racking. Clouds were forecast overnight, maybe even rain. At 4:45 the alarm went off, and through the curtains I could already see the moon shining. Not a cloud in the sky. Phew.

Fog

At 5:15 I was out the door, and the fog was coming up. No. Not now. Luckily it was very local. I set up at the Geensmolen, and there was no fog there. Clouds did roll in later, but only around sunrise. What luck.

On the small screen

At 5:41 I wasn’t looking up. I was watching the little screen on the back of my Z9. You have to keep an eye on your camera, make sure nothing strange happens at the last moment. Then I saw it: a white dot coming in. It reached the moon, and I lost it. The station was lit by the sun, bright against bright, and on that small screen it simply vanished. I had no idea whether it had worked.

Waiting

Then I looked up. I’ve seen the ISS in the sky plenty of times, that clear point of light moving steadily across the dark. There it went. But whether I had it, crossing the moon, I would only know at home. Those were tense moments too.

There it is

At home, on the big screen, there it was: the space station, lit by the sun, crossing the moon in less than a second.