For example, if you go to a football game, you probably won’t get to see as much of the game as if you stayed at home and watched TV. But there’s something about being there that counts. That’s probably how [Sebastian Voltmer] feels. While we’ve all seen videos of astronauts and cosmonauts taking spacewalks, [Sebastian] managed to take a snapshot of some spacewalkers from his telescope†
Of course, this was not your ordinary Christmas gift telescope in a department store. The instrument was a Celestron 11 inch EdgeHD Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on a very expensive GM2000 HPS mount. An ASI290 planetary camera captured the photo. You can see the gear and more about the photos in the video below.
Like a football game, you could probably see more if you watch NASA Select TV, but somehow it just isn’t the same. Upon further analysis, [Sebastian] discovered that he had taken photos of both astronauts, although the first photo only identified [Matthais Maurer] who, oddly enough, comes from the same city as [Sebastian]†
Our hats are off to anyone who can capture these kinds of images. We already have enough trouble taking selfies. While the spacewalk in the photo lasted more than seven hours, the ISS would only have been visible from [Sebastian’s] location for a small part of it. So he couldn’t do a 12-year exposure. While you can build your own astrophotography gear, most of what we’ve seen won’t easily reproduce this feat.
This post Watch a spacewalk in real time
was original published at “https://hackaday.com/2022/03/31/watching-a-spacewalk-in-real-time/”
