More ISS flyover photos

Space Shuttle Discovery’s scheduled landing was scrubbed Thursday afternoon, so in the evening, I was able to see the Shuttle and the International Space Station together in the sky for the third consecutive night. Well, sort of. This time, they were far enough apart that I didn’t actually see them both simultaneously (the Shuttle had “set” behind a nearby house before I caught my first glimpse of the ISS), and I certainly couldn’t have captured them in the same camera frame.

I did get some nice photos of just the ISS, though — or, in this case, of the ISS and a low-flying airplane:

The airplane, at the top, is making its approach to DIA. Meanwhile the Space Station, i.e. the steady line in the middle-left part of the image, is nearing the Big Dipper, which is visible at right, above our neighbor’s house.

More notably, if you look closely at the line of the ISS, you’ll see that it appears to “flare” slightly in the middle of the 25-second exposure — a visual effect that can occur when a stray glint of direct sunlight reflects off the Space Station’s enormous solar panels. Here’s a close-up, highly enhanced version of the same image, more clearly showing the flare:

The star it’s passing is, I believe, Cor Caroli. It appears elongated because of the long exposure and the rotation of the earth. Anyway, the ISS bright spot occurred at around 8:03:20 PM, which is almost 40 seconds prior to the ISS’s predicted peak altitude, and thus peak brightness, for this pass. So it was definitely a flare.

More photos after the jump.

Here’s another photo, a 20-second exposure that I started approximately 20 seconds after the previous photo’s exposure ended. This one shows the ISS actually traversing the Big Dipper, with the same airplane now in the lower left corner:

This next photo is a 15-second exposure, zoomed in, and it shows the ISS getting brighter and dimmer and brighter again, as it shines through a thin, wispy cloud:

Here’s another 15-second exposure, showing the ISS flying over the crabapple tree in our backyard, with Cassiopeia in the top right-hand corner:

And finally, here’s a 29-second exposure of the Space Station “setting” behind the aforementioned nearby house:

You can follow the latest developments with the Shuttle mission at Spaceflight Now. Regardless of what happens, though, the upcoming potential passes are all pretty dim. The ISS won’t get bright in the Denver skies again until late September.

P.S. If you missed my video of Tuesday’s extremely close double flyby, click here.