An off the cuff attempt at capturing the ISS as it transited the sun one day in June. I used a Dwarf 3 smart telescope to take a 4k video of the transit at 30 frames per second. Loaded the subsequent video into PIPP for conversion into a series of tiff files.

I then created a “base” solar image using footage before and after the ISS transit to provide a nice stacked and sharpened image for me to work on in GIMP, then I individually sharpened each transit TIFF image in registax 6 using wavelets.

Using BIMP the Batch image processor plugin for GIMP I applied the same crop, sharpening and curves to each image of the ISS and the Base solar image to make the image look more yellow, rather than the very monochrome white it started as.

Then loaded every one of the 23 frames of the ISS transit as a layer in the base image and using a mask painted in only the area in each layer to build up the stacked image of the ISS sillouette moving in front of the surface of the sun.

The individual frame, is the “highest quality” (according to pipp) single frame I managed to get from the video footage, cropped down to see a single shot of the ISS. I plan on making a blog post about it on the site at some point that’ll go over the planning and logistics of doing it, along with more detail on the editing. I’ve also got a video of the transit pass too, that i’ll share there when I get a round tuit.