February 18, 2022’s Photo of the Week winner is Shakeel Anwar, who captured an early morning transit of the International Space Station passing between the Earth and the Moon.

Shakeel Anwar said he set out from his home in Mississauga, Ontario, to Jerseyville, Ontario on July 4, 2021. He left in the early morning to capture this 140-kilometre transit of the ISS around the Moon. Anwar parked in the driveway of a farm and quickly set up his Canon 6D camera and LX-90 eight-inch telescope. He had just over half a second to capture the transit.

“To image the transit, a 6D was attached to the eight-inch LX-90 with an f/6.3 focal reducer to capture the full lunar disk,” he wrote. “The camera was set to video mode at 30 frames per second.”

Anwar said one of the biggest challenges he faced when capturing the image was focusing on the low contrast lunar surface against the bright blue sky.

“This required some time and would need to be perfect to obtain a sharp image of the ISS and the background lunar surface,” he said.

The brightness also made it difficult to view the image through the live view of Anwar’s camera, he wrote, making it difficult to both focus on the target and confirm if the image was captured successfully.

Honourable mention

This week’s honourable mention goes to Luc Bellavance, who captured a photo of the Orion constellation and surrounding nebulae.

Orion is situated astride the celestial equator and can be seen from both hemispheres. From Canada, Orion is best observed from November to February, when it is most visible in the night sky.

Bellavance captured this image of Orion on January 22, 2021, from Rimouski, Quebec while using a Canon EOS 500D camera and 35mm Tamron lens at f/1.6 sporting a CLS-CCD clip-on filter. Bellavance said he captured 65 60-second exposures and edited the image using PixInsight and Photoshop.