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Amateur Astronomer Grabs Amazing ISS Picture
The Bad Astronomer writes "Ralf Vandebergh is an amateur astronomer, and using a simple telescope with a video camera attached to it, he took an incredibly detailed picture of the International Space Station. You can easily see the recently-installed truss and solar panels, as well as the Space Shuttle Discovery docked to the station."
He has a number of photos posted at Cloudy Nights in the "Planetary and Solar System Observing" forum.
He basically used a method reminiscent of a technique used by amateur astronomers to take pictures of planets and asteroids: take a lot of frames using a cheap webcam and stack them together, weeding out the bad ones as you go.
The principle behind it is pretty simple. When it comes to seeing nearby planets (Pluto and friends are obviously exceptions), telescopes are limited less by magnification and more by atmospheric distortion. What's not clear from the article is if this is a single frame grab (which is pretty cool but not an incredible technical feat) or if he managed to track it precisely enough to stack a few frames.
Thats no moon,it IS a space station give the man some geek points!
You can view things up in orbit this way too. Just don't do it without the proper filtering protection.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's a football field, 200 miles away, traveling at 17,500 mph.
You try it.
On a clear disk you can seek forever.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
It's blurry because it's taken through miles of atmosphere. That's why Hubble is in orbit and most observatories are on top of mountains.
If you run it through the image processing software they use on 24, you can actually make out the license plate number too.
I mean I wouldn't be surprised if he was getting pretty close to that limit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_criterion#Explanation To make that short I kind of remember this from my physics class that ultimately the limit on being able to differentiate between 2 objects depends on the size of your main mirror/lens and the wavelength of light you use. (IE a bigger main mirror or shorter wave length of light means you can differentiate between closer and closer objects.) If I remember correctly I did the math and found out that you'd need a mirror about 250 meters across to resolve the landing site on the moon from an earth based telescope. (But I can't remember if that resolution was 1 meter or 30.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Any sign of that bat?
It's certainly a good image, but not the best. This image of Ralf's, for instance, is noticeably more clear. He has many more amazing images though on his site here.
Except it's not, it's the cheer squad ON the football field. And you're complaining because you can't see their tits clearly.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
If you run it through the image processing software they use on 24, you can actually make out the license plate number too.
Even though its on the other side, facing away from us.
They can lift the print of the guy who screwed it on too.
But the real feat is that they can make out the license plate of the car across the street of a suspected terrorist by enhancing the reflection on one of the space stations windows, on a cloudy day.
I used to enjoy TV. Its almost sad. I can watch a rerun of something like "Columbo" and I find fewer plot holes and more credible police work, more credible set designs, more credible ... everything, than I do on CSI. Sure in Columbo the villain was usually improbably or even implausibly ratting himself out... but compared to the routine violation the current limits of technology, and in many cases the known limits of even theoretical sciencce we are subjected to in the CSI's... Columbo is actually the more beleivable... by far.
I can't believe the government are allowing people to take these sorts of images. This is just a gift to the terrorists, they'll be able to see exactly which parts of the space station to target and may even be able to bring the whole thing down on a major population centre.
Unbelievable !