The last training event last week was a briefing on NightPod, a system that interfaces with the still cameras on ISS to help astronauts with night photography.
As you probably know, taking pictures in low-light conditions requires longer exposure times. Even if the subject is not moving, it’s hard to get a sharp picture without the use of a tripod, since the little shaking of the hand is enough to introduce blurring. A fixed tripod, however, is of little use when you’re trying to photograph the Earth at night from the Space Station, because the target is moving fast in the field of view. You may try to rotate the camera to match the movement – and some people are quite skilled at that – but NightPod does it a lot better.
The system is mounted on a bracket in the Cupola, so that the camera faces the big nadir window. After initialization, the software asks for inputs regarding current altitude and attitude of the Space Station; based on that data it calculates the necessary rotation rate that needs to be imparted to the camera so that the target on the Earth surface looks stationary in its field of view. And there you go: you can have longer exposure times without compromising sharpness.
This will be my last logbook for this week of vacation. As always, see you on the other side!
Unless of course you’ll join us in Cremona, Northern Italy, this coming Saturday for this event with my friends of WeFly [Italian]:
https://www.weflyteam.com/wefly/Evento_Cremona.html
And if you want to know more about WeFly, check out this past logbook.
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
10/06/2014