Congrats on your first transit! You did a pretty good job actually; with my first transit I think I got my focus pretty good, but my exposure time was way to long so it didn't look half as good as yours. Maybe you could add a simple tool to estimate correct exposure: take satellite angular velocity, enter your scope focal lenght and camera pixel size (which basically gives you angular resolution), and you can calculate how long would it take for the satellite to move one pixel - that would be a reasonable exposure time. I actually have a spreadsheet to do exactly that when I try to capture a transfer. With Sun transit you can go pretty low as you have plenty of light, but with Moon or especially planets there have to be some compromises. One other idea I have, that you could maybe think of adding in the future: generate precise ground track of a satellite (optionally with specified offset) the same way you do it for transit lines - I recently learned that there are some satellites that use visible laser eg. for cloud cover measurement and if you know precisely where and when to be, you can actually see that laser beam shine on you if you look up :)
Congratulations for your transit!! Once I tried to understand how often the TLE of the ISS were updated and to what I noticed the TLE were updated once or twice a day. And I met at a star party someone who works in collaboration with NASA about a project he has with the ISS, long story short, he told me that they perform manoeuvres to slightly change the trajectory of the ISS several times a day but the TLE don't get publicly updated every time they do it. It might be why your transit was not perfectly were you expected it. I also noticed that sometimes, ISS tracking is very precise and easy, and sometimes it's a bit off for "no reason".
Something I forgot to mention in the video, is the “T+Epoch” parameter in the “Satellite Data” frame. The epoch is the time of reference for which the orbital elements are derived so it gives you an idea of how fresh the data is. Of course, even if it is reasonably current an orbit adjustment could have just been made. Anyway, “T+Epoch” is the age of the data is expressed in days. When I got permission to use direct links from Celestrak.com for TLE files, they requested that the software has some mechanism to prevent a user from continually downloading files and putting undue resource on their servers. To honour that request, SkyTrack will not download a new file if the current file is less than one hour old. For transits, you may want to work around this by deleting the previous TLE file in the skytrack folder so a new one will download. Doing that should be the exception though.
Excellent demonstration! Will be trying this out with my iOptron AZ Mount Pro too.
Congrats on your first transit! You did a pretty good job actually; with my first transit I think I got my focus pretty good, but my exposure time was way to long so it didn't look half as good as yours.
Maybe you could add a simple tool to estimate correct exposure: take satellite angular velocity, enter your scope focal lenght and camera pixel size (which basically gives you angular resolution), and you can calculate how long would it take for the satellite to move one pixel - that would be a reasonable exposure time. I actually have a spreadsheet to do exactly that when I try to capture a transfer.
With Sun transit you can go pretty low as you have plenty of light, but with Moon or especially planets there have to be some compromises.
One other idea I have, that you could maybe think of adding in the future: generate precise ground track of a satellite (optionally with specified offset) the same way you do it for transit lines - I recently learned that there are some satellites that use visible laser eg. for cloud cover measurement and if you know precisely where and when to be, you can actually see that laser beam shine on you if you look up :)
Congratulations for your transit!!
Once I tried to understand how often the TLE of the ISS were updated and to what I noticed the TLE were updated once or twice a day. And I met at a star party someone who works in collaboration with NASA about a project he has with the ISS, long story short, he told me that they perform manoeuvres to slightly change the trajectory of the ISS several times a day but the TLE don't get publicly updated every time they do it. It might be why your transit was not perfectly were you expected it.
I also noticed that sometimes, ISS tracking is very precise and easy, and sometimes it's a bit off for "no reason".
Fantastic. I have a few coming up.
Something I forgot to mention in the video, is the “T+Epoch” parameter in the “Satellite Data” frame. The epoch is the time of reference for which the orbital elements are derived so it gives you an idea of how fresh the data is. Of course, even if it is reasonably current an orbit adjustment could have just been made. Anyway, “T+Epoch” is the age of the data is expressed in days.
When I got permission to use direct links from Celestrak.com for TLE files, they requested that the software has some mechanism to prevent a user from continually downloading files and putting undue resource on their servers. To honour that request, SkyTrack will not download a new file if the current file is less than one hour old. For transits, you may want to work around this by deleting the previous TLE file in the skytrack folder so a new one will download. Doing that should be the exception though.
The software version number is 1.7.8 however it shows that a newer version 1.7.7 is available.
Haha, you caught me! The website is currently configured for v1.7.7 as the newest version and I am using a beta version of v1.7.8.