Double Eclipse Photographed, Sun, Moon, and ISS

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Double Eclipse Photographed, Sun, Moon, and ISS

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 4, 2011 @08:44AM from the well-isn't-that-pretty dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "The exceptionally talented astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured a picture extraordinary even for him: the space station passing in front of the Sun while the Sun was being partially eclipsed by the Moon! He traveled all the way from France to the Sultanate of Oman to take this amazing shot. I have more information about the picture itself on the Bad Astronomy blog, but you should go to Thierry's website to see more amazing pictures he's taken over the years. They're simply jaw-dropping."

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Eclipsed .... by gstoddart · 2011-01-04 08:46 · Score: 4, Funny

Looks like the site has been eclipsed already. :(

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1. Re:Eclipsed .... by TheL0ser · 2011-01-04 08:49 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  It always amuses me to think of servers and networking equipment melting whenever I see a slashdotting.
2. Re:Eclipsed .... by rehabdoll · 2011-01-04 08:49 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I managed to get the page loaded before.
  http://www.rinnestam.se/thierry_eclipse_iss.jpg
3. Re:Eclipsed .... by b0bby · 2011-01-04 08:55 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Try the Coralize plugin for Firefox; it doesn't always work, but there's often a cache. It worked in this case, and the picture is pretty amazing.
4. Re:Eclipsed .... by MarkvW · 2011-01-04 09:01 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  The photog only authorized PRIVATE use of the picture. Why don't you respect that and take it off your site?
5. Re:Eclipsed .... by mangu · 2011-01-04 09:03 · Score: 2
  
  Looks like the site has been eclipsed already. :(
  Perhaps it was running in an Eclipse server
6. Re:Eclipsed .... by mcgrew · 2011-01-04 09:03 · Score: 2
  
  There is no dark side of the moon. As a matter of fact, it's all dark!
  
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7. Re:Eclipsed .... by Opportunist · 2011-01-04 09:08 · Score: 2
  
  This is no moon...
  
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8. Re:Eclipsed .... by N1tr0u5 · 2011-01-04 09:10 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  People are complaining about the nice fellow that is serving up the image when the site has been slashdotted, but no one is complaining about cache servers serving up the image. Why?
9. Re:Eclipsed .... by N1tr0u5 · 2011-01-04 09:19 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  People are complaining about the nice fellow that is serving up the image when the site has been slashdotted, but no one is complaining about cache servers serving up the image. Why? Aren't they just as guilty of unauthorized reproduction as he is?
10. Re:Eclipsed .... by e4g4 · 2011-01-04 09:22 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Does the same apply to these guys?
  
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11. Re:Eclipsed .... by choongiri · 2011-01-04 09:29 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Here are copies that don't contravene the photographer's usage request:
  http://astrosurf.com.nyud.net/legault/eclipse110104_solar_transit.html
  http://legault.perso.sfr.fr.nyud.net/eclipse110104_solar_transit.html
12. Re:Eclipsed .... by rehabdoll · 2011-01-04 09:30 · Score: 2
  
  fine, gone
13. Re:Eclipsed .... by N1tr0u5 · 2011-01-04 09:34 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  So as long as I automate the replication of content on the web (eg, make the server do it instead of manually doing it), it is legal? That sounds like a fallacious argument.
  
  I agree, I appreciate that I am able to see it via his website. I'm just confused as to why the line is drawn.
14. Re:Eclipsed .... by RazzleFrog · 2011-01-04 09:35 · Score: 2
  
  Copyrights are unethical? They may have too long a life and be enforced in unethical ways but I am not sure how allowing somebody exclusive rights to their work for a limited period of time is unethical. Typically people who think that way have never created anything worth worrying about.
15. Re:Eclipsed .... by snookerdoodle · 2011-01-04 09:46 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The photog only authorized PRIVATE use of the picture. Why don't you respect that and take it off your site?
  Gee, thanks for getting him to take down a mirror of a slashdotted image. I actually wanted to see the thing.
  Moron.
16. Re:Eclipsed .... by jthill · 2011-01-04 10:15 · Score: 2
  
  I think private was meant as "non-commercial", not "don't cache". Hard to imagine he'd serve it with a no-cache tag.
  
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17. Re:Eclipsed .... by ArundelCastle · 2011-01-04 10:16 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Thierry's notice says "use". "Distribution" is neither literally or legally considered synonymous with use (in north america). And yes I am a photographer, I'm sure Thierry knows the difference too. He's famous enough to know that these things spread.
  The only thing the parent did improper is rename the image from eclipse110104_solar_transit_33.jpg to thierry_eclipse_iss.jpg, which disrupts Thierry's ability to track its propagation, even though it is nice enough to include his name as an inherent keyword.
  For the server argument, astrosurf.com/robots.txt doesn't disallow bots from crawling images. Many commercial photographer sites do.
  A bot can indeed be guilty of ignoring those rules, but that just means it was programmed without concern for rules.
18. Re:Eclipsed .... by choongiri · 2011-01-04 11:35 · Score: 2
  
  The difference is fairly obvious. The coral cache mirrors the whole page, including context, credit, the usage conditions and links to the photographer's other work.
19. Re:Eclipsed .... by Jesus_666 · 2011-01-04 14:00 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You could make the point that copyrights as practiced today are unethical. Effectively-endless copyrights mean that society never gets to freely use any literary or artistic work even though many of these copyrighted works freely use earlier, unprotected works. They also stack the market in favor of big corporations who can afford to license anything they want to use (and swallow any lawsuits from rights owners who don't want to give them a license). Even if copyrights are never extended again, durations close to a century are effectively eternal in some sectors like IT.
  
  Copyrights aren't bad per se but the current implementation is most likely suboptimal for society and can be argued to be unethical on those grounds.
  
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Re:That's no moon by ArcherB · 2011-01-04 08:53 · Score: 5, Funny

...it's a space station.
So apropos for once.
Actually it is a moon AND a space station.

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Photoshopped by michelcolman · 2011-01-04 08:54 · Score: 4, Funny

The shadows are all wrong.
1. Re:Photoshopped by scotty.m · 2011-01-04 09:03 · Score: 2
  
  This looks shopped
  This, not so much
  
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Re:Amazing! by bryansj · 2011-01-04 08:56 · Score: 5, Informative

From the link: Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS), taken from the area of Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman on January 4th 2011 at 9:09 UT, during the partial solar eclipse. Takahashi FSQ-106ED refractor on EM-10 mount, Canon 5D mark II. 1/5000s exposure at 100 iso. Transit forecast calculated by www.calsky.com (many thanks to Arnold Barmettler for his help). Transit duration: 0.86s. ISS distance to observer: 510 km. Speed in orbit: 7.8km/s (28000 km/h or 17000 mph). The image shows three planes in space: the Sun at 150 million km, the Moon at about 400000 km and the ISS at 500 km.
OMG it's a double ecplise all the way! by RevWaldo · 2011-01-04 09:01 · Score: 4, Funny

What does this mean!?

.

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1. Re:OMG it's a double ecplise all the way! by dkleinsc · 2011-01-04 09:30 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  No, that's actually a misprint. It's actually The Great Conjugation, an event in which all possible verb forms in all known languages are spelled out and used correctly in a sentence.
  
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Alan Shepard whacking golf balls by PolygamousRanchKid+ · 2011-01-04 09:39 · Score: 3, Informative

Some folks from the former East Germany sometimes ask me if the Apollo Moon landings were faked. Some admitted that they were taught so in school. Wrong shadows, flapping flag, etc.
I reply that I got up at 04:00 EST when Apollo 14 was on the Moon, and Alan Shepard knocked around some golf balls. Walter Cronkite looked liked he was grabbed out of the grave, and did not seemed amused that CBS dragged him out of bed to report on the Moon walk.
Golf balls on the Moon? Not even the wackiest Hollywood director could think that thing up.
Of course, the definitive evidence for the Moon landings is a mirror they left behind, which is used to shoot lasers at to determine the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Of course, one could argue that a Moon chick dropped her compact powder kit . . .

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1. Re:Alan Shepard whacking golf balls by Jason+Levine · 2011-01-04 13:24 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Technically speaking, the mirror could have been left by an unmanned probe. Of course, all the rest of the evidence points so overwhelmingly towards the Moon landing being fact and not fantasy. (The Mythbusters did an expert job at busting the various "proofs" that conspiracy theorists give.) I'd say that the biggest knock against the conspiracy is that it would have required thousands of scientists, politicians, engineers and various government officials to keep the secret for over 40 years now. Plus the others that would have been involved in the subsequent Moon landings. (We did go more than once.) When have you known that many people to keep a secret that big for that long a time?
  
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Re:Go Canada! by Locke2005 · 2011-01-04 10:06 · Score: 2

From this page:
"The SPDM, or Canada Hand, is a smaller two-armed robot capable of handling the delicate assembly tasks currently handled by astronauts during spacewalks."

No, I'm not making this shit up!

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Re:photo of IIS transiting the sun is not unique by Abstrackt · 2011-01-04 10:11 · Score: 2

I'm pretty sure the eclipse is the unique part of this picture.

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Re:Amazing! by JonahsDad · 2011-01-04 10:28 · Score: 2

Yes. Transit duration means that the ISS was passing in front of the sun for 0.86s.
the only thing more awesome than that pic by v1 · 2011-01-04 10:30 · Score: 2

would be a video showing the ISS zip across the sun. (slowed down please! since the transit was less than one second) Good lord that man has good timing... (but I suspect he actually took a video of it and we're seeing a still - I mean who in their right mind would chance that with a single shudder click??)

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A transit is not an eclipse by 517714 · 2011-01-04 12:29 · Score: 2

Thierry Legault knows this. The writer of the summary seems to be more interested in a sensationalist headline line than in accuracy.

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I'm glad I came back by xaxa · 2011-01-04 12:31 · Score: 2

I stopped reading Slashdot in disgust at the article + comments last week.
Today I've come back. This is the kind of article I want to see! The comments are still 95% shit though.
Did anyone in London see the eclipse? Unfortunately, I wasn't aware of it until too late -- had I been, I'd have got up extra-early and taken a train out of London if necessary.
Re:Not from video by wvmarle · 2011-01-04 16:44 · Score: 3, Insightful

There isn't any difference between "video" and "lots of stills taken in short succession".
It's known exactly when the ISS is passing the Sun, so for making such a shot I'd start a short time before that moment and end shortly after, taking a shot every 0.2 seconds (or however fast your camera can manage - this are pretty high resolution images), and you have a couple dozen shots at least one of which should include the moment.