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Shuttle and Hubble Passing In Front of the Sun
GvG was one of several readers to point out this "incredible photo clearly showing the silhouette of Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope as they passed in front of the Sun was taken Wednesday, May 13, 2009, from west of Vero Beach, Florida. The two spaceships were at an altitude of 600 km and they zipped across the sun in only 0.8 seconds." The image is all over the Web now, for good reason.
It was todays astronomy picture of the day!
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Reminds me of the scene in the new Star Trek movie with all the people escaping from the Enterprise, and you see the scene with a massive star behind them, and they look like tiny specks against it.
is that me or is that a housefly on an orange.
thats because god used coreldraw
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
Here's a much more impressive transit.
My first thought was that the picture is a reminder of our insignificance relative to the greater universe (and even the quantum universe).
But what daring goes into these missions! Tiny we may be but we have great ambition.
...omphaloskepsis often...
This was done with a refracting telescope and a digital camera, and it happened in 0.8 seconds.
What, exactly, were you expecting?
Its not a NASA photo.
http://www.astrophoto.fr/
Thierry Legault is a guy with a telescope and camera.
Your not supposed to look directly at the sun and this guy points a telescope at it. I think its pretty good. Who knew what the sun would look like with a shutter speed of 1/8000 sec.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/15/check-this-out-amazing-photo-of-the-sun/
It's not a NASA photo. A guy went out with a relatively nice (Canon II 5d) camera and a 5-inch refracting telescope and took this at exactly the right moment. Pretty amazing when you think about it.
west of vero beach is the stomping grounds of nasa engineers. I was in melbourne (like a 20 minute drive from vero beach) this past weekend and spoke with a few engineers who worked for nasa through contracts. That entire area is known as the "space coast". This was probably taken by an ex-nasa engineer or photographer. About month ago when I was up there was a rocket launch and there were probably 5-10 nasa guys in the street watching it. That area is absolutley saturated with guys who have an interest in nasa's activities and the professional know-how to do such things. While it could still be a hoax, there is nothing physically impossible and the location of origin of the photo only lends credibility.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
36.6 out of 100 on the Acquine scale.
http://i39.tinypic.com/zv21si.png
west of vero beach is the stomping grounds of nasa engineers. I was in melbourne (like a 20 minute drive from vero beach) this past weekend and spoke with a few engineers who worked for nasa through contracts. That entire area is known as the "space coast". This was probably taken by an ex-nasa engineer or photographer. About month ago when I was up there was a rocket launch and there were probably 5-10 nasa guys in the street watching it. That area is absolutley saturated with guys who have an interest in nasa's activities and the professional know-how to do such things. While it could still be a hoax, there is nothing physically impossible and the location of origin of the photo only lends credibility.
Well, there you have it then. NASA at work. That's the agency that faked the moon landings, you know.
(Yes, I am kidding.)
Of course it's a fake. The sky in the background is black, so obviously it's night, but for the sun to be out the sky would have to be blue. Duh!
(kidding of course. It's a fantastic picture and reminds me of how small we really are compared to the rest of the universe. Kind of like stepping into the Total Perspective Vortex except it doesn't fry your brain.)
Yes, I've read all this, but my question is: Is this such a fantastic and amazing picture or am I just too accustomed to the high quality of NASA photos?
I find the most eye opening fact is that the sun is 93,000,000 miles behind the shuttle. It is an awesome display of the scale of the sun.
you could get a picture of passing gas.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
It's a real photo, and it's not terribly difficult to take such photos if you have a good camera, a good telescope (Takahashi is among the best), and most importantly a good equatorial mount for the scope. For solar photos like this, add a good broadband solar filter into the mix.
Lock the scope onto the Sun, set the camera to capture frames as fast as possible, and then throw out everything that comes out crappy. There were two really good frames of the Atlantis shown, but there are no telling how many awful-looking ones were discarded. People do this kind of stuff all the time, but it just doesn't get publicized.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I don't think I've seen a transit like this that is of much higher quality, unless its taken from another spacecraft, and then you're not likely to get the same effect. The ISS ones I think are a little more impressive because its bigger and there are a lot more details to make out.
Really this is about the best you can do for something like this. This looks to be right at the seeing limit (maybe doing it from a higher altitude could help), and theres plenty of light, so a bigger telescope isn't going to give you anything.
What are you looking for to make it more impressive?
NASA
I mean come on, he didn't even use a flash...
This photo is actually of comparable quality to what you'd get from NASA, given the same conditions under which it was taken under.
Bear in mind that the photo is being taken through many, many miles of air, during the daytime, and the daytime heat causes all kinds of instabilities in the air that will show up as waviness in the image (the same phenomenon causes stars to twinkle at night). Finding steady air at night is hard enough, but getting images this clear during the day is remarkable, even taking the quick shutter speed into account.
Also bear in mind that the Sun is only about 30 arcminutes across as seen from the Earth, meaning that the Shuttle silhouette itself is at most just a very few arcseconds in size. To put it in perspective, it's on the order of getting a clear photo of the text "In God We Trust" on a dime from the other end of a (US) football field while the dime is moving at 4 feet or so per second.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
The photo is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Among them:
1) This was done by a guy with a portable telescope and camera that he carts around in the back of his car, not a mountaintop observatory or mega-million satellite.
2) You had to be in exactly the right place at the right time. That is, in a line a few km long for the less-than-one-second that the transit took place.
3) You have to know how to photograph the Sun without frying your equipment or going blind. You need enough magnification to resolve the spacecraft but not so much to miss the target.
4) For a non-professional, this photo took an impressive amount of equipment, configured properly and operated perfectly.
And it's no fake. There's another photo showing the Shuttle and the ISS transiting the Sun and the two are very similar. In that photo, the ISS is the more prominent object.
Here's one with the space-station taken a few years ago:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060921.html
Table-ized A.I.
I think you need to spend more time staring at the Sun. Big yellow orb? Check.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
While I realize the difficulty of actually taking this picture, am I the only one who thinks this picture is actually really terrible quality? Or am I just used to much better quality from NASA photos?
They're up there to *fix* the hubble. They haven't actually fixed it yet...
There's no place like
(Kind of like stepping into the Total Perspective Vortex except it doesn't fry your brain.)
No, it just burns your retinas.
There's no place like
i treid goinf outside and seeing ti. watcjed fpr a wile, couldn't see it. the someone saus it happened back on wedndsday. ugh, missed tht totally ,shoudl hafve RTDA. still hjaving some troubnle with my visonin and typing . a;so havng trouble remembering which kyes are which. lckily iu know whow to post ro slashdot blind.
Everyone knows the sun-landings were faked.
How is it the sun's all evenly yellow, and has pixelation because of being a very short exposure and mega zoomed in- and yet the space shuttle has clearly defined features? I'd have to call a fake if NASA didn't vouch.
That explains it. I wondered what that fleeting shadow was.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I thought Solar Wind was invisible.
-FL
In Soviet Russia, the hubble photograph you. Get it?
looks like something someone did in paintbrush. has anyone actually verified this as legit, it wouldn't be the first time the intrawebs fell for a hoax.
The people who run APOD are better judges of validity than you or I when it comes to astronomy.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You would also need to have up to date trajectory data on the shuttle and the ability to turn it into a findable 3D location. Consider the size of the orbiter in that image. If it deviates by 10 or 20 of its own diameters in any direction there will be no shot.
He has to find a spot on a line between the sun and the shuttle. If he goes up a mountain he has to go sideways to be back in the "beam" so to speak. If he sets up near a road he has to avoid being run over. If he sets up in a field he has to avoid being attacked by farm animals, etc.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I love that our sense of scale is still messed up from the photo. The sun looks so damn huge in that picture that it looks like the astronauts would just see this wall of sun if they looked out the window when it would really be no larger then we see it about the size of a large coin.
I could see more clearly what was going on if they just cleaned off those two little black specks in the picture.
I am anarch of all I survey.
You don't really need full ephemeris data, you'd just need to know when the transit happened. I'll grant you determining when the transit happens is a more difficult problem, although you can pull the data off of the JPL HORIZONS http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons data.
Get two text files with a list of RA/DEC for the sun and Hubble for the next week, and set up a script to read through them and find the closest approach. If its less than the radius of the sun you have a winner. Given that this guy does this a lot (he's credited for earlier ISS images) he probably has a script set up to download and check the ephemeris for any satellites or other objects of interest a week or two in advance..
At least thats what I'd do... in fact maybe I should buy a solar filter and do just that...
Sure kid, I got one for ya.
...how beautiful the simplest things can be.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
Bear in mind that the photo is being taken...during the daytime...
Definitely should have taken the picture at night.
photographer
Every half-competent photographer knows you should use a flash when taking a picture of a backlit subject.
Doesn't matter how much fixin' they do, the Hubble would suck at getting this shot. ;)
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
When seeing a picture of a two-thousand ton manned space ship next to a space telescope with a huge nanometer accuracy mirror being repaired by a crew of people in space suits all whizzing through space with a class G star looming in the background, "simple" was not exactly the first thing which came to my mind.
or passing in front of a lemon. Awesome pic either way.
That looks so much more like what Hollywood has taught me to expect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limb_darkening
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
thats because god used coreldraw
God, that runs only on Windows!
Pah, if you want to feel more insignificant, hop on over to images.google.com and look at (in order): "globular cluster", "M31 Andromeda", "M31 Andromeda +halo", and "Hubble Ultra Deep Field" (HUDF).
Bear in mind that when you see a spiral galaxy in HUDF or in the deeper part of the M31 Andromeda halo deep exposure, you are seeing a galaxy about the size of M31, with about a trillion stars about the size of the one in the picture that is already making you feel insignificant relative to the "greater universe".
HUDF, btw, is a rather small fraction of the sky, subtending a solid angle of about 10% the size of the full moon. The sky looks about the same (filled with galaxies) in all directions where we don't have stars and dust clouds in the way. HUDF also only shows what could be picked up during the exposure time; a longer exposure would show still more galaxies at all ranges. Finally, HUDF shows human-visible wavelengths only; there are lots more galaxies visible in longer wavelengths, for a variety of reasons (mainly related to angle, occlusion and the Hubble Flow).
Something to think about the next time a science fiction character or superhero talks about destroying or saving the universe...
At least you made it obvious that it's fake.
Sure kid, I got one for ya.
Nice work there. Could also serve as a "how many things are wrong with this picture" shot.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
While driving through Florida a couple years ago, on vacation, I got lost. When I stopped by a Seven Eleven and asked where I was, and the guy answered "Melbourne", I promptly returned in the best Australian accent I could fake "I am sure I am still in Florida. It's very unlikely I could get that lost using a car".
The guy pointed my location on a map. 20 minutes later I was back to the hotel.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
NASA can upgrade their equipment with a fuel scoop, which allows raw fuel to be skimmed from the surface of stars - a dangerous and difficult activity - and collecting free-floating cargo canisters and escape capsules liberated after the destruction of other ships.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Why cutie, have I hurt your feelings before?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
By the same photographer, no less.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Well the shadows are all wrong for a start.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well the shadows are all wrong for a start.
Did you mean the shadows, or the reflections?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
"For a non-professional..."
You haven't looked around his site, have you? He is a professional. As he says "I have made two books: The New Atlas of the Moon with Serge Brunier (Firefly) and Astrophotographie (Eyrolles)."
Doesn't matter how much fixin' they do, the Hubble would suck at getting this shot. ;)
I should have known better than to make a slightly funny and slightly technically inaccurate joke on slashdot... ;)
There's no place like
How did he work out where to go and exactly when to take the picture?
This photo has so little going on in it and yet it is truly amazing, stopped me in my tracks.
It IS a NASA photo. Thierry made this image (and other images during this mission) under agreement and support of NASA for the STS-125 mission. NASA HQ PHOTO Dept.
Lame.
But NASA could avoid all those problems by using the Hubble Space Telescope!
This sig cannot be proven true.
How do we know it's not fake?
I mean, you take a photo of the sun, then photoshop the shadow on?
Anyway of showing with some degree of certainty either way?
If this is a genuine picture, it's a triumph, one of the best astronomical photos I've ever seen.
that looks shooped. I can tell from the shadows and the pixels.
No, it just burns your retinas.
But mama, that's where the fun is!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?