ISS flyby by Shakeel Anwar

Shakeel Anwar’s patience and ingenuity came through in a series of images he captured of the International Space Station and combined into a GIF, winning him the Photo of the Week title for November 27, 2020.

Shakeel Anwar caught the ISS on a flyby on July 4, 2020, connected to the Canadarm and SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour | SkyNews Magazine — ISS flyby by Shakeel Anwar

Manually tracking the ISS from Mississauga, Ontario, Anwar used an Meade 8″ LX90, a 2.5× Tele Vue Powermate, a ZWO ADC and a ZWO ASI224MC colour camera to capture the space station.

“This was the most difficult and most rewarding capture of 2020,” he wrote. “This sequence captures the historic first manned Space X mission to the Space Station.”

He said the video was processed in Planetary Imaging PreProcessor (PIPP). Frames where the ISS appeared were selected and grouped into discreet frame sequences and stacked in AutoStakkert. The end result was 15 images, which are comprised of between three and 13 frames each. Each image was then processed in RegiStax followed by Photoshop. The images were then recombined into an animated GIF.

“The final animated GIF gives the impression of a viewer floating in space as the ISS glides by,” Anwar wrote. “The SpaceX Endeavour spacecraft is easily visible along with the Canadarm2, which was parked in an L-shaped configuration to the right of Endeavour.”

“That whole set of images — he’s done a lot of work there,” commented one judge.

“Anybody who can keep a long focal length telescope pointed at the ISS for a long time deserves a Nobel or something,” said another.

An image of a "northern Moai" snow sculpture and night sky scene by Warren Finlay, taken November 14, 2020 | SkyNews Magazine — Snow sculpture and night sky by Warren Finlay

Our runner up this week is an image of a “northern Moai” snow sculpture and the night sky scene behind it by Warren Finlay.

Shooting from Sherwood Park, Alberta, Finlay said he made the sculpture from snow dumped during a storm, then captured this shot the next night, November 14, 2020.

He said he shot the image with a Canon 6D, a 14mm lens at f/1.4. The exposure was 30 seconds.

Prizes for the 2020-21 SkyNews Photo of the Week contest are sponsored by Sky-Watcher, Celestron, iOptron and The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Click here for more details on the prize packages that will be awarded to the best photos this year.