Spotting crewed Dragon capsule chasing the Space Station

Merged photo showing crewed Dragon capsule chasing the International Space Station (ISS)

There’s a lot happening in space this summer.

We’re just a few weeks from three planned missions to Mars (more on this later), Starlink continues to launch more satellites, OneWeb is in the news, and there’s been the first private launch of a crewed vehicle to the International Space Station (ISS).

The Dragon capsule was launched by SpaceX on the 30th of May 2020, and just after launch it flew over London. It was very hard to see!

I was standing in the nearest park and, to be honest, can’t claim to have actually spotted it myself. But I took a stack of photos and with the help of Twitter and Calsky worked out roughly where it should be and after a lot of processing managed to find its track.

The above image is a merge of all the frames with the key elements highlighted. The ISS is the brightest and the crewed Dragon is on a track lower down but parallel to it. As predicted by Calsky, the crewed Dragon track goes through the constellation Corvus. There are also various other satellites, including one bright flare, and the Moon.

The frames were also put together into a video, below. It loops three times, with the crewed Dragon highlighted for the middle loop.

All images taken with a Sony A7iii and 24mm F1.4 GM lens.