BA: ISS, Shuttle transit the Sun!

[bystander]

ISS, Shuttle transit the Sun!
Bad Astronomy - 18 May 2010


Solar Transit of ISS and Atlantis - Last Mission of Atlantis (Thierry Legault)

The big yellow thing is the Sun. But look at the upper right section. See those two dark blips? The one on the left is the Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis and on the right is the International Space Station! Incredibly, Thierry caught them as they passed directly in front of the Sun! To give you an idea of how talented Thierry is, the entire transit lasted just over half a second.

Click to embiggen. I mean it, click it. The full-scale image is drop-dead incredible. Mind you, Atlantis had just started its pitch maneuver, designed to show its belly to the crew on the ISS so they can inspect it for heat tile damage. That means this image was taken shortly before the Orbiter docked with the station, on May 16th. Thierry was in Madrid specifically to get this shot.

[BMAONE23]

W O W

[Hofi]

Great image! It's really sharp in relation to the conditions!

[owlice]

That's a great shot! The photographer has a picture (with a link to a video) of the ISS on this thread, too.

[bystander]

APOD: Station and Shuttle Transit the Sun (2010 May 23)

[Hofi]

APOD: Station and Shuttle Transit the Sun (2010 May 23)

Good choice!

[wonderboy]

This picture genuinly is amazing. I have yet to see the ISS in daylight flying over scotland

I really want to aswell.


Paul

[neufer]

I have yet to see the ISS in daylight flying over scotland

I really want to as well.

Do you mean specifically "in daylight" ? (Not an exciting prospect, IMO.)

The closest the 340 km high ISS would come would be about 500 km south of Glasgow
so it would be relatively low in the sky but it should be visible from time to time.

Glasgow: 55.858 N.
ISS inclination: 51.642 degrees

[wonderboy]

well I haven't really seen it at night time either to be honest. Just a sighting would be fine. 500KM is a lot tho, I imagine with it being so low in the sky it wouldnt be around for long.

I just find the prospect of seeing something in space moving during the daytime more exciting than night time, when (if you were looking) you would expect to see it.


Paul.

[bystander]

Two solar ISS transits!
Bad Astronomy - 26 May 2010

I have two more amazing images for you! Both show the same thing — the International Space Station crossing the Sun — but in different ways.

The first is, once again, from Thierry Legault:

Wow! You can clearly see the station (with Atlantis docked on the left!) as it crosses the Sun. Here’s a slight closeup:

There’s a nice sunspot pair there in the upper right; the one on the right looks like a face, actually. Cute. This shot was taken at 1/8000th of a second, which froze the action nicely. He has higher resolution pictures on his webpage for this event.

The second picture is slightly different:

It was taken by Heiko Mehring and obviously shows a series of silhouettes as the ISS and Atlantis crossed the Sun. You can clearly see the same sunspots, but the path of the spacecraft is slightly different, and the spots look a bit different as well. The equipment Heiko used was less fancy than what Thierry has, but you can still see a lot of detail in the image. It really is amazing that we can see such detail on the station from the ground!

[owlice]

Here are two more images, these sent in by Achim Schaller; they were taken yesterday. This is a combination of two images, as Atlantis followed the ISS by about 13 seconds for this transit; this image shows the track of both transits.

transitk_Schaller.jpg (97.84 KiB) Viewed 2801 times

And this is a detail of the ISS:

issdetail_Schaller.jpg (97.24 KiB) Viewed 2801 times

[mexhunter]

Hello to all:
That photo of Thierry Legault, is fantastic.
In June 22 of 2009, to 80 miles of my house, we had a transit of the ISS in front of the Sun.
In a photo, that does not compare to the quality and opportunity of Legault, I could capture that transit.
Coordinates: 26.205504N, 100.598373W



Thanks to come to see.
Many greetings
Cesar

[owlice]

Cesar, that's a great photo; thank you for posting it!

[Amir]

Nice Photo Cesar.
what filter(s) did you use? H-alpha?
and is every single ISS a result of one frame?

[mexhunter]

Hello owlice, Amir:
Thank you very much to see and to comment the photo.
Amir, I used a telescope 120mm apo, to which I connected a set of filters Coronado Ha of 90mm and a BF-30.
I also connected a focal reducer to 0.5X, the camera was a DMK41 that working to 15 frames per second. It generated 8 individual frame, because the transit only lasted 0,45 seconds. This is a sequence of the 8 frames:



Many greetings
Cesar

[Amir]

thanks for the Details Cesar, and for sharing your great photos.

[wonderboy]

Here are two more images, these sent in by Achim Schaller; they were taken yesterday. This is a combination of two images, as Atlantis followed the ISS by about 13 seconds for this transit; this image shows the track of both transits.

transitk_Schaller.jpg

And this is a detail of the ISS:

issdetail_Schaller.jpg

Nice photos, I love sun transit photos, it brings a lot into perspective, like that photo there proves how big the sun is, but it also proves who far we have come technologically and as a race, with an actual space station built by the world floating above our earth.

Its also nice to see some sunspots on our sun. Its been to quiet..... a little tooooooo quiet.

lol


Paul.