The weekend of July 11th 2004 was a good opportunity to get video of the space station - it was visible each night for five orbits in a row. Its closest point on this pass was 605 km away, with altitude about 360 km.

The rectangular bars at the top of the station are the American solar power arrays. Of the three bright areas below, the side bars are radiators and the central long bar is the series of pressurized modules, airlocks and Russian spacecraft that make up the crew's living space. At the time of this image, Gennady Padalka and Mike Fincke had been on board for 12 weeks, the ninth crew to man the station since October of 2000. The station's current mass is 187 metric tons and is about 75 metres across its longest dimension.

Location: David Dunlap Observatory
Equipment:
8" SCT with laptop interface
SatelliteTracker software v2.3.8d
2"/SCT Antares Diagonal
2x Apo Barlow
StellaCam EX
Recorded on Canon MiniDV camcorder
Image Capture with ATI TV Player 7.1
Cropped in Photoshop 6.0
30 frames aligned and stacked in Registax 2.2