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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.

16 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Astronomy Picture of the Day by gibbled · · Score: 5, Informative

    It was todays astronomy picture of the day!

    http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

  2. Transit by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's a much more impressive transit.

  3. Re:Reminds me... by davester666 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...my eye's...I can't see anymore...

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    Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  4. Re:Crappy quality by LordKaT · · Score: 5, Informative

    This was done with a refracting telescope and a digital camera, and it happened in 0.8 seconds.

    What, exactly, were you expecting?

  5. Re:Crappy quality by RpiMatty · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

  6. Shocking fact by GregoryD · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. I didn't think... by HeLLFiRe1151 · · Score: 5, Funny

    you could get a picture of passing gas.

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    I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
  8. Re:Crappy quality by S-100 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:Reminds me... by timster · · Score: 5, Informative

    Your understanding seems off -- the picture we're discussing is a photograph in every sense. "Trick of perspective" is an odd way to speak of it, since the perspective is simply that as visible from the ground, where the photo was taken.

    --
    I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
  10. Re:Astronomy Picture of the Day [ISS] by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's one with the space-station taken a few years ago:

    http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060921.html
         

  11. Re:Reminds me... by pfft · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the link: "Thierry made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera." If that's not a photo, then what is?

  12. Re:Crappy quality by timeOday · · Score: 5, Funny

    am I the only one who thinks this picture is actually really terrible quality?

    Sure kid, I got one for ya.

  13. Re:Reminds me... by byornski · · Score: 5, Funny

    I just accidentally my eyes.

  14. Fail. by cheesecake23 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Every half-competent photographer knows you should use a flash when taking a picture of a backlit subject.

  15. Simple??? by janwedekind · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  16. Limb darkening by JohnnyDanger · · Score: 5, Informative
    The edge like that because you see a shallower, thus cooler, portion of the sun's photosphere. As a cooler source of blackbody radiation, it looks darker and more orange. The phenomena is called limb darkening.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limb_darkening

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body