hi I'm Dave Dickenson from aster guys calm and today by popular you how you can set up a low-rent way to track and photograph satellite right I'm going to walk around and show you my little ad-hoc setup that I have here that I've been using with some success to photograph satellites right here we have a homemade weather station for the laptop that keeps it portable and keeps it contained out here this keeps due from forming on it do is a big problem here in Florida and this also keeps your setup kind of where you can just tow it in tow it out without lugging a lot of parts out here it makes a good little case setup for the laptop itself the laptop you're going to be running the freeware software and it's going to have I also rigged up a little fan that hooks in here that keeps the area cool and keeps air circulation going this is the eyepiece I'm probably going to be using for initial acquisition this is a wide field 42 millimeter eyepiece but when you're actually when you've got it hooked up you're going to be using the webcam the webcam is just a log tech 4000 off the shelf for $40.00 webcam that I modified so the eyepiece fits in there and I use this for planetary photography and it occurred to me that when the International Space Station is passing over it's about the same brightness and about the same size as Jupiter or Saturn or things I was already imaging now the big problem you're going to have is focus and tracking because when your national space station moves over it's going to be moving like a star so there is their sophisticated tracking software out there however our scope doesn't even have drive motors on it it's not an old newer sophisticated type scope like that I'm the drive motor for the skills it's what you're going to have is tell ran right here for a target err this is going to track and like say an airplane tracking over right now that's actually a good way to to use what we're going to do we have a pot grabber here you could use a pool stick a broomstick anything that would the idea is you want to guide it like the old-style cameras you see where they had it where you're guiding it like this and what I'm doing is I'm aiming through the reticle and I'm tracking I'll do a little demonstration of it in a moment and you're trying kind of like a triple a gun you're kind of tracking the satellite as it moves overhead now you're not going to get the satellite in every frame the idea for this is you want to get the satellite if you watch it when you see on the imagery you're going to see it like hop around but you're going to want to just grab one or two good frames out of maybe out of a thousand you'll get 20 good frames that will show an image in it but that's the setup and the key to the setup like I said is the very low-tech broomstick slash pot grabber the webcam the software in laptop and the teller ad for targeting and how do you have that the pool stick attached to the scope we have that hooked up with bungees so you can just remove it we have bungee cords and you can see the hole if I swivel it around so you can make this whole thing happen at Walmart oh yeah excellent yeah all you need for this kind of imaging and planetary imaging if you have a telescope a webcam in a laptop which most houses have webcams and laptops kicking around and you're for an amateur astronomer and you have a telescope you could be doing this kind of imaging tonight it doesn't take a lot of sophisticated the software I download is free that runs on the computer that does the processing and the image tracking it's k3 CCD tools which actually you have to subscribe to now is like 20 30 bucks to be free and register which is a free software program processing program I use which still is free processing but it's a very low-tech setup all right we're back here with our ad-hoc satellite tracking setup I'm going to show you briefly just how I have to be positioned when the satellites coming up overhead I'm looking down through this reticle right here and then I'm guiding it like this and I'm trying to keep it centered centered centered I've already got the software set so when the satellite comes overhead and I see it I just have to hit like record and it's all focused and ready because you don't have time to be running back and forth to the keyboard while you're tracking for the focus on it what I do is I try to find something bright that is similar to the ISS over the horizon venus makes a very good target Venus is similar in brightness and magnitude to the ISS and it's stationary so you can have it all set up in the focus and the line and the shutter speed and everything I shoot maybe about one 500 shutter speed is a good turn speed to shoot at for the ISS because it's similar to what Venus is but this is basically our setup in its this is how we try you set up here you can be shooting satellites tonight you