Starship Asterisk*

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.

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

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

I really want to as well.

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 wrote: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