1100 Miles in Orbit: Behind the Scenes

"1100 Miles in Orbit" is an image that prompts emotion whenever I look at it, especially on a large 24" x 36" aluminum print!  From April 30 until May 20, 2016, you can see this print among others in my exhibit "By Land, Sea, and Space" at The Better Bean Coffee Co. in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. It's an image in which I take particular pride, and I felt "1100 Miles in Orbit" deserved a full background story on how it came to be.

"1100 Miles in Orbit," Middleboro, Massachusetts

The beginning of the story is simple.  I had been exploring the possibilities of photographing the International Space Station (ISS) crossing the night sky.  It's a beautiful sight, if you know when and where to look for it.  Thankfully NASA provides a valuable resource that can tell you when the ISS will visible from your location (https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/).  The ISS can appear as bright as or even brighter than Venus.  You don't need a telescope or binoculars to view it.  It resembles a plane at night, except there are no flashing lights, and it rushes by fairly quickly.  If you take a single photograph of it, say around 20 seconds, it looks like a meteor.  At longer exposures, you can tell you're looking at something unique among the stars.  The ISS is only visible near sunrise and sunset, because what you're seeing is the reflection of sunlight bouncing off the station.

On Sunday, April 3, 2016, the ISS was expected to become visible in the northwest at 8:41pm in southeastern Massachusetts for about five minutes, moving toward the northeast and not too far from the horizon.  I chose Pocksha Pond in Middleboro, Massachusetts as my location. There's a narrow road, Long Point Road, that divides Pocksha Pond (to the north) and Great Quittacas Pond (to the south).  Several large blocks of stone descend from the roadway into the water on the northern side; I set up my tripod and camera gear on a stone just a few inches above the water surface.  It was a cold night (around 35 degrees F) and somewhat windy, but not enough to affect the stillness of the camera shots.  I took some test shots using a Canon 6D and a 14mm Rokinon lens at f/2.8 aperture.  I decided upon a 200 ISO setting and a 25-second exposure.  Once I programmed an intervalometer to take 25-second shots with a 1-second interval between them, all I had to do was sit and watch.  You might ask why I didn't just take a 5-minute exposure; the two reasons are increased image noise and an overexposed shot.

The star indicates my location (courtesy of Google Maps)

The ISS appeared right on schedule.  For five minutes, I was able to simply take in the scene and be amazed.  Usually with photography, I'm not fully able to appreciate the scenery until I process the images later, because it's a reactive process of adapting the camera to the environment.  But for these moments in time, I could actually feel the experience.  This beacon of light sailed across the night sky, gradually dipping toward the horizon.  I asked myself questions... What were the astronauts doing during that time?   How lucky are we to have this space technology?  How many other people are looking up at this sight right now?  While taking all of it in, I felt like a young child again, mesmerized with wonder.

Once the ISS disappeared, I packed up all of my gear and made the short drive back home to my desktop computer. When I pulled up the raw images, I knew I had captured something truly great. The post-processing involved four steps: 1) using Adobe Lightroom to make corrections for contrast, lens aberrations, etc. in all eleven images; 2) using Startrails to "stack" the eleven images of the ISS into one shot; 3) using Adobe Photoshop Elements to process the stacked image [mainly to clean up the image due to the unsightly light trails of a lone aircraft]; and 4) using Google Nik to create a gritty, painting-like look. Here are some visual examples from each step of my process:

A single frame; note the edges need to be cropped due to lens corrections;
also you can see below the ISS trail there is an aircraft's trail

Stacked images, unedited

Cropped, colors adjusted, plane's trails removed

I could have stopped with the last image above.  It's a very clean photograph.  But I wanted to add a gritty, painting filter with some subtle adjustments using Google Nik.  The final result is what you see at the beginning of this post and what hangs on the wall in my favorite coffee shop!

In this photograph, I believe there are a few points upon which you can focus, all of which add to its unique beauty (in my interpretation):  The building and surrounding trees are part of the Island Terrace Nursing Home.  The nursing home creates some light glow in the sky, but it also shines some distinct lights upon the water surface. The trees ground you to the earth in the photograph.  Several wispy clouds along the horizon add some movement; they're sort of dream-like.  You can see star trails in the night sky that draw your eyes to Polaris, the North Star, around which all of the stars appear to revolve.  And of course the International Space Station's light trail is the central theme. There are small gaps in the light trail of the ISS, due to the one-second gaps between each 25-second shot; I'm okay with those gaps because they show moments of silence from the camera perspective. Finally, there's the added gritty filter - my own personal artistic mark.

The title "1100 Miles in Orbit" references the distance that the Space Station traveled in its orbit around the earth during the time that it was visible.  It is a fast moving technological marvel that won't be around forever.  Russia, the United States, Japan, Canada, and the European Space Agency all have collaborative stakes in the International Space Station.  We're guaranteed to see the ISS in the night skies until at least 2020.  Beyond that, its expectancy is unknown.  For now though, we should appreciate it -- scientifically and visually!