Iridium Flare

[JimUSNY]

I got a calsky alert of a real bright iridium flare tonight.. so I set up on the deck..moon is full so sky is lit pretty much like day, but this was a magnitude -7 so it shined thru the light fine had to lower the whites a lot to get rid of some of the blue.. 60 seconds at 12MM cropped a little, F3.5 ISO 400 on EM1 and the 12-50 kit lens

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[OzRay]

That's pretty good. There's not much star movement for 60 sec.

 

[JimUSNY]

That's pretty good. There's not much star movement for 60 sec.

yeah you dont see it much at 12MM but zoomed in full it shows, and it was almost due north so not as bad as when you get away from north

 

[OzRay]

I've been waiting for some clear weather so that I can do more astrophotography, but all we're getting at the moment is cloudy night skies.

 

[JimUSNY]

I hear ya, I havent been out for any pics much in the last couple weeks, have only had sun 2 days in 15, was cloudy all day and cleared just after sundown today

 

[kwalsh]

Nice one! When I used to live in dark skies in the middle of nowhere I'd often drive the ten or fifteen miles to get directly under the main beam of the flare. Some of them were really spectacular - always a bit of uncertainty in the pointing so even when the prediction was for maximum brightness you never did know for sure what you were going to see. Ah, memories. In light polluted cloudy east coast of US these days. Blech.

 

[MadMarco]

Great picture! The "rule of 500" is a good guide as to how far you can push an exposure without seeing visible star trails.

Maximum exposure before trails = 500/focal length

I'm going to post some pictures of a home-made barn-door tracker that I used to use before I got all fancy with the Astrotrac it worked surprisingly well for a couple of bits of wood and an old door hinge.