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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/
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?
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!
NASA
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
Everyone knows the sun-landings were faked.
That explains it. I wondered what that fleeting shadow was.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.
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.
Every half-competent photographer knows you should use a flash when taking a picture of a backlit subject.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limb_darkening
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
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...
By the same photographer, no less.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas