Not very big, and further away than Cardiff

[fivemack]

On the other hand, the biggest and nearest object in low Earth orbit, and startlingly visible as it swept majestic and orange across the sky, horizon to horizon in a couple of minutes.

500mm lens, hand-held, short exposures (it's in full sunlight, so 1/1000 f/11 is reasonable), hold down the button and pray that at least once the shutter fires while the camera is momentarily stationary:



The grey rectangle on the right is one of the Space Station's solar panels, the white splodge on the left is the space shuttle Atlantis.

Advice on achieving critical focus at infinity with long lenses hand-held would be appreciated.

Smaller, and closer to home, does anyone recognise this splendid orange-spotted, four-tufted hairy bestiole that I found on a bramble?

Comments

[redbird]

cattitude's advice was "get a shorter lens" until I explained exactly what you meant by "at infinity," and then he changed it to "get a tripod."

But I don't know if you'll need this often enough to bother.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I have a pretty good tripod; the problem is that the space station is moving faster than I can sensibly loosen the tripod adjustment handles, adjust the tripod to get the space station into the field of view, tighten the handles and expose. So I use the tripod for long-exposure star-field shots, and brightly-lit distant objects - birds, space stations, planes at airshows - I do hand-held at the shortest exposure that's reasonable.

I am pretty sure the problem is getting the focus right; it is dark, auto-focus doesn't work, there's only a millimetre or so's movement in the focus ring between being obviously out of focus one way and obviously out of focus the other even if I use a small aperture, and I can't see any difference in the viewfinder between things that turn out well-focussed and things that turn out inadequately focussed.