At the end of May I noticed that the International Space Station was going to be flying over our house just after sunset on a particularly clear night. So Aila and I stayed up a little later than usual and set up some chairs on the back deck to watch it. I set up my camera on a tripod and took a bunch of photos as it was passing overhead. I stacked the photos using DeepSkyStacker to produce this composite image of the flyby.

It didn't turn out quite as good as I was hoping, but it wasn't too bad. Even though the sun was down and the sky was dark, there was still quite a bit of afterglow from the sunset. To the naked eye, the sky was almost completely dark, and the space station was a brilliant white light moving quickly overhead. However, in order to capture the moving space station, I had to use a long exposure, which really brought out the sky glow, almost to the point of drowning out the space station.

That's just par for the course when you are trying to photograph difficult subjects, I guess. The main thing was that Aila and I got to have a magical moment together out on the deck, watching a real life space station cruise over our house.

Technical Details: This picture is a composite of about 15 photos taken with my Canon 5D Mark II + EF 17-40L at 17mm, ISO 100, f/5.6 for 15 seconds each.