Santa Barbara photographer Fritz Olenberger is known for his work chronicling most of the events that the city is known for, including Old Spanish Days, the Summer Solstice Parade and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
You have definitely seen his iconic shots of dancers at La Fiesta Pequeña, at the Santa Barbara Mission, and riders at El Desfile Histórico, the historical horse parade.
On Monday night, he focused his sights on something new: the International Space Station’s full-moon lunar transit.
Around 11:24 p.m., the ISS path across the moon was visible from Santa Barbara, says Olenberger.
He set up shop at Los Patos Way, near the Stella Mare restaurant, with his camera, a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV with a 600-mm lens.
His resulting image, above, is a composite of frame grabs from a 4K-quality video shot at 30 frames per second, with a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second, he said.
“Mother Nature was kind enough to provide a brief and very unexpected clearing of the sky in what was otherwise a cloudy night,” he told Noozhawk.
He used the website transit-finder.com to find information about upcoming solar and lunar transits, which are less than one second long.
“Because the duration is so short, it is better to record a video and take frame grabs from it than to take individual exposures,” he said in an email.
“I downloaded an ‘atomic clock’ app on my cell phone that gives the time of day to the second, in order to know when to start the video. I allowed several seconds before and after the predicted transit time in order to make sure I captured it. A good tripod is a necessity.”
Olenberger first tried to document a lunar transit on Feb. 3, but realized his memory cards didn’t have the capacity to record more than a few seconds of such high-quality video.
He saw the opportunity for another one on Monday night, near the Andree Clark Bird Refuge.
“I was eager to make a second attempt at photographing it, but as the date approached, the forecast was for cloudy skies and rain. At about 9 p.m. that evening, I saw that the sky was full of clouds, with a light overcast. The moon was barely visible. It was surely a no-go,” he said.
“Shortly before 11 p.m., I thought I would look outside again before I went to bed. To my surprise, I saw the full moon with only a few clouds in the sky. I told my wife we were going to give it a shot, and we gathered the equipment and went to the right location. About 10 minutes after getting the shot, the clouds returned.”
The International Space Station, which is about the size of a football field, has a crew of three people aboard right now.
Mission Control at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, publishes ISS sighting opportunities for 6,700 locations around the world, so people can out when it will be visible overhead.
Click here for Santa Barbara sighting information.
— Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.