The Moon and the ISS!

The International Space Station, currently on a full crew, had two apparitions over Bombay over the past three days. I took my sister's cam, a Nikon Coolpix S51, today to try and capture the ISS, and test the cam, in night sky conditions. The results were pretty satisfactory, I must say, and the pictures that came out with maximum exposure compensation(I handled the camera in the dark for the first time today, so I did not really fine tune the settings), were better than I get from my cam, a lowly Kodak C330. Below are two pics that I clicked today.

Try and spot Spica near the Moon in the pics, just above it.

The ISS appears to the lower right of the moon(the tiny bright spec just below the clouds). On zooming into the pic, you can see the familiar 'T' shape of the ISS.


The sight may not look quite nice in the pics, but the Moon peeping out from the clouds with the ISS grazing them just as it went past made a heavenly picture indeed.

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* Tailpiece *

This is an update to the post. I just found out that Spica is an eclipsing binary! It was always known to be a double star system, but now the MOST space telescope has figured it out to be an eclipsing binary. Read the article on Sky & Telescope...
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