Thierry Legault is a gift to astronomy bloggers. He just sent me this:
Holy.
Hale.
Akala.
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.
Un frakkin’ believable.
Get a good look. This is the last mission of Atlantis (unless it’s needed as a rescue mission later this year), so we won’t get too many more views like this.
Related posts:
Extremely cool 3D Space Station video taken from the ground
Check. This. Out. Amazing photo of the Sun
Image used with permission by Thierry Legault.
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May 18th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
O!
M!
G!
What a sight!!!
May 18th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
Incredible. Stunning. Plus many other adjectives that can’t come to mind as I’m completely blown away as usual. I figured it was one of Thierry’s images even before I read the caption.
May 18th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
I’m sure Thierry can write a book on how to do this.
I’d still bet a lot of people would get the book just to see his photos.
Talk about sunspotideolia – anyone else think those spots look like the space shuttle and the ISS?
Note the limb darkening – now why can’t I see such a thing when I stare at the sun?
May 18th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
How tiny we are !
Chilling to think there are people in those little do-dads !
The embiggened view shows only a hint of blur. The seeing must have been very good indeed, and the telescope must have been very stable, and the astronomer very talented !!
May 18th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Odd that there are no sunspots — we’re supposed to be near a solar max, aren’t we?
May 18th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
I think there’s got to be an OMFSM aspect to that statement as well.
So, how much time and effort went into setting up this shot from a 1/2-second window?
May 18th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Actually the Sun is just now starting to leave an unusually long solar minimum; it’s been very quiet for many years.
May 18th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
[...] La Estación Espacial Internacional y el Atlantis transitando por el Sol blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/18/iss-shutt… por kurioso hace 3 segundos [...]
May 18th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Really cool, or should I say hot picture Dr Phil!
May 18th, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Awesome picture! I wish I had the money and time to be able to capture cool space pics like this!
May 18th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
I am in AWE. That is a fantastic picture. Totally geeking out right now.
May 18th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
I heard that if you stare at this photo long enough you see an image of Jesus. I’m afraid to try…
May 18th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Dr. Plait:
Enclosed please find two invoices for reimbursement:
One for $248.23 to cover the cost of examination and stitches in my chin,
and one for $824.91 that was spent to repair the damage to my floor that was struck by the aforementioned chin.
In the future, please consider that there are very real and potentially expensive consequences to posting such amazing images in your blog.
May 18th, 2010 at 6:24 pm
This looks even better than the similar one Thierry Legault took on May 15th last year. (The Check.This. Out. one linked by the BA at the end. Which seems not to be tagged under “Sun” here btw.)
Hmm.. May 15th last year, May 18th this year this looks like a great yearly tradition ..
Except as you noted :
Is that totally certain now?
I had hoped that they were going to do one last mission with Atlantis later – converting the “stand-by for possible rescue” into an actual final flight.
Such a shame. They should keep flying the Shuttles longer, I wish they would.
Also I gather there are only 6 crew aboard atAtlantis this time – but I thought the Shuttles usually fly with seven – why is that?
PS. TV comic / current affairs host David Letterman did a good speil on his Late Show about this current (final?) flight of the Atlantis last night. (Aussie schedule.) Apparently David Letterman himself was there watching the launch of STS-132.
May 18th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
I take it all back. I imported it to iPhoto and then enlarged it to its maximum. It’s absolutely amazing to be able to see the texture of the surface of the Sun in such detail. Does the absence of sunspots mean that we are in big trouble with global climate change when they return? But what are those two big black blobs in the right upper corner?
May 18th, 2010 at 6:40 pm
@ ^ Wayne Robinson – Take all *what* back? This looks like your first comment about this photo or on this thread. (Puzzled.)
May 18th, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Amazing!
Phil, if that doesn’t make your list of top ten astronomy photos of 2010 I’ll be even more amazed.
May 18th, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Bet there’s a good story behind the trip and the planning to get that photograph especially if he went by air–i.e. Iceland’s volcano keeps shutting down airports. Thierry needs to write a book for sure–part “how to”, part adventure story, part jaw-dropping good photography.
May 18th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Still no sunspots, eh? Huh.
Anyhow, thanks for the super awesome picture! I didn’t think it was even possible to catch something like that in the glare of the Sun’s light.
May 18th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Phreeeow.
May 18th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
[...] Above for times. If the orbit is very right and you are very good, you might even be able to take a picture of the two against the Sun. But what was it like for those at the launch of Atlantis? Direct questions to the crowd of 150 [...]
May 18th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Look closely. That’s the starship Enterprise, as in Kirk and Spock.
The “neck” of the ship is cloaked at the moment, but that’s probably because the photo was taken while the ship was cloaking or de-cloaking, or whatever they call it.
May 19th, 2010 at 1:20 am
Spectacular photo. In the enlarged version, I was startled to be able to see that the Sun’s edge appears to be textured. Is that real, or just an optical illusion?
May 19th, 2010 at 1:51 am
Awesome shot!should get the Oscar for astro-photography if there is one…a prolonged solar minimum,mmmm ,another Carrington Event coming up maybe ? Thankyou Bad Astronomy for featuring this photo.
May 19th, 2010 at 1:55 am
Amazing! Although I see no sunspots.
May 19th, 2010 at 2:29 am
It’s not the first time we see a photo like this, but it’s still very COOL!
May 19th, 2010 at 2:35 am
This sort of awesome reminds me why I love science
May 19th, 2010 at 3:05 am
The other night I was walking home on the outskirts of Tokyo and happened to look up in time to see two bright points of light about 5 degrees apart scooting across the heavens. It didn’t take long to realize what they were but having only seen one object at a time before, to see Atlantis actually chasing after the ISS was absolutely amazing. They seemed to get closer as I watched but maybe that was an illusion.
I was dying to tell everyone to look up but there was no-one around. Had I been at the crowded train station I left some 10 minutes before I would have grabbed the microphone from one of the amateur musicians and yelled to the commuting masses to pull their eyes from the ground and catch something they have never seen before and may never see again in their lives.
It’s sad to think that I probably won’t either.
May 19th, 2010 at 3:14 am
[...] » noticia original [...]
May 19th, 2010 at 3:31 am
Call me overly cautious, but I’m viewing the image through a little hole in a cardboard box.
May 19th, 2010 at 4:01 am
[...] (Vía Bad Astronomy). [...]
May 19th, 2010 at 5:03 am
Is this astounding piccy also available in a lossless format?
May 19th, 2010 at 5:18 am
La Estación Espacial Internacional y el Atlantis transitando por el Sol…
Lo grande y amarillo es el sol. Pero fíjate en la esquina superior derecha. ¿Ves esas dos manchas oscuras? La de la izquierda es el Atlantis y la de la derecha, la Estación Espacial Internacional. Increíblemente, Thierry los atrapó al pasar directament…
May 19th, 2010 at 6:34 am
[...] Discover Magazine. [...]
May 19th, 2010 at 6:41 am
Looks fake, I’m calling Photoshop. But seriously, that’s pretty cool.
May 19th, 2010 at 6:58 am
Nice picture. That guy’s got some amazing talent to catch it so well. Saw the ISS transit overhead on Saturday night (maybe Friday? Whenever Atlantis launched) Was surpsired how easy it is to tell it’s a not a star nowadays, even with naked eye it looks…. not starish, and with some cheapy binoculars it definitely looks like it’s got little extra bits on it.
Really hope they don’t decommission it anytime soon, I’d love to see us keep building her up and make her a real gateway to deep space.
May 19th, 2010 at 7:00 am
[...] » noticia original [...]
May 19th, 2010 at 7:22 am
No, we’re just coming out of solar min. Unusually slowly right enough, but we’re nowhere near solar max.
May 19th, 2010 at 8:36 am
Thanks for the amazing pic!!!!
May 19th, 2010 at 8:37 am
Thanks for the amazing picture!!!!
May 19th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Absolutely Amazing and Totally Cool!
May 19th, 2010 at 8:42 am
That’s the next best photo to one showing sunspots. (Hey, I’m a ham, and we hams LOVE sunspots.)
May 19th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Now THAT ought to charge up those solar batteries!!!
May 19th, 2010 at 10:01 am
For those who are wondering “where are the sunspots?” and “where are we in the solar cycle?”, see:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
May 19th, 2010 at 11:24 am
[...] the image for the full-size version, and be sure to read more on Thierry’s site or BadAstronomy.com (thanks to Phil for the [...]
May 19th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Bon voyage. Hosta la vista Atlantis
It’s been a good run!
I worked for Webber Aircraft that manufactured the ejection seats for the Gemini project.
May 19th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Seriously, it looks fake because the sun is soooo uniform. Not only no sunspots, but very little color variation even. Unless you zoom way in, this looks like someone drew a circle, picked a yellow color and hit “fill”. Too perfect.
However, when I do zoom in and see the detail, it leads me to conclude it is a real, if very unusual, photo. Very cool.
May 19th, 2010 at 12:35 pm
I’m guessing, but there was probably some serious filtering going on to make the shuttle and ISS visible; that probably led to the lack of visible solar activity…
May 19th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Alert Starfleet ! Klingon battlecruiser !! In the small image anyway =)
May 19th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
I agree. That is totally ridiculous!
May 19th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
[...] Meneame Desde Discover Magacine Foto tomada por Thierry Legault La foto fué tomada por Thierry el dia 16 de Mayo poco antes de que [...]
May 19th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
I’m sure you’re a great guy, Phil, but you write like a 12 year old girl.
May 19th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
At some point I stopped explaining my worldview to the religious in part due to the number of responses that seemed to suggest pity that an atheist/scientist/skeptic lacked the ability to see the universe with awe and wonder (exactly the opposite, I would contend – I look with awe and wonder at that which hubris tells them they understand). This picture makes me feel like I’m standing in Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex.
As for the sunspots and overly-flattened sun, I’m guessing this is just depth-of-focus? It reminds me of looking at layers of cells on a slide. Imagine focusing on something very small and near in front of something very visually complex and far. To make the foreground sharp, the background looks vague and homogeneous.
May 19th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
thats beautiful. must be some sort of irony having awesome astronomy on the bad astronomy website though! although i aint complaining
May 19th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
[...] The original image (it’s huge!) was obtained from the Bad Astronomy blog and can be seen here. [...]
May 19th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
I am at a loss for words. Awe-inspiring, incredible, mind-blowing… They can’t do justice. Just sit back and bask in the wonder of it all.
May 19th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
badass. 100% badass….
May 20th, 2010 at 3:26 am
So, Phil, you could totally do a great geeky post on this Thierry Legault guy’s methods. I put pen to paper a bit (making a few assumptions of course) and it looks like he’s working at the edge of diffraction limited resolution here. If you assume that he’s got a 30 cm telescope (12″), is measuring light near the ultraviolet (lambda = 400 nm) and that the space station is 300 km overhead, you get a distance of about 0.5 m, assuming no loss of resolution due to optics or atmospheric turbulence, which is bound to inflate that number a little bit at least.
Looking at a model of the international space station, those solar panels are about 2.6 meters separated from one another. In the image, the panels are clearly resolved. In other words, he’s working at the very limits of resolution. And his 3D pictures appear to have even more resolution than these pics.
This is a situation where the cool factor is amplified by geekery.
May 20th, 2010 at 7:03 am
Gotta love those Keplerian elements for tracking orbital bodies like the ISS & Atlantis. Wicked awesome snap.
May 20th, 2010 at 6:23 pm
Was the photo taken with an iPhone?
May 21st, 2010 at 8:26 am
[...] permalink This is subtle… but very cool. Be sure to read the article. ISS, Shuttle transit the Sun. [...]
May 21st, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Thank you for making me feel completely without talent. This is an extraordinary astrophoto. Brilliantly done. Where can I find out more on your technique to capture this image. Thank you-just beautiful!
May 22nd, 2010 at 3:15 am
There was a bit of bad astronomy linked to this story. The Daily Mirror, in its coverage of this image, helpfully pointed out that the picture was taken in daylight. (Much easier than photographing the sun at night, I think you’ll find.)
May 22nd, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Great picture,great timing.Almost missed the chance!!!!!
May 23rd, 2010 at 2:45 am
[...] la ocurrencia de una rara oportunidad para grabar la combinación moviéndose rápidamente en siluetas a lo largo del disco [...]
May 23rd, 2010 at 11:11 pm
[...] the occurrence of a rarer opportunity to record the spacefaring combination moving quickly in silhouette across the solar [...]
May 24th, 2010 at 1:58 am
Thierry Legault’s Sun with ISS & Atlantis orbiter image appeared full colour with a reasonable write-up in my state (South Australia) newspaper – The Advertiser – page 17, Sat. May 22nd 2010.
May 24th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Am I the only one who saw the image scrolling down and thought “TIE Fighter?!” XD
That’s a pretty awesome photo though
May 25th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Trying to get a little bit of a sense of scale here.
The Internets tell me that the ISS is about 250,000m above the earth’s surface [1], give or take. The sun is about 150,000,000,000m away (1 AU, approx.).
The profile of the ISS covers about 10,000m^2 (length * width, assuming that it is parallel to the earth’s surface) [2], and the sun has a diameter of about 1,400,000,000m [3]. So the circle of the sun we’re seeing here has an area of about 15,000,000,000,000,000 (15 quadrillion) m^2.
Wow.
(I rounded, kept the units the same and didn’t use scientific notation so that the sheer number of zeros could sink in.)
[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_high_is_the_space_station
[2] http://www.howstuffworks.com/space-station1.htm
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_sun
May 26th, 2010 at 6:26 am
When a plane passes over head the shadow it casts is virtually full sized. This is due to the fact that the sun is close to infinity and a point source. So the question is: does the ISS cast a shadow? Can the ISS looking down with a telescope see its shadow? My guess would be no. because due to its orbital height it does not obscure enough of the sun to define a shadow.
The ISS would be detectable from earth by measuring a dip in the sun’s output during transit (like the extra planet searches) but no blink.
On further thought its a dumb question.
May 26th, 2010 at 6:47 am
Das Astronomiebild des Tages…
Heute möchte ich auf eine Seite verweisen, die mir beim Betrachten der präsentierten Bilder schon oft Stoff zum Nachdenken gegeben hat – einfach weil sie aus immer unterschiedlichen Perspektiven die ungeheure Dimension unserer Welt zeigt. Ich bin dankb…
May 27th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Embiggen is not a real word.
June 2nd, 2010 at 10:40 am
It’s a perfectly cromulent word!
July 13th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
THE SUN IS FREAKING TINY!!!
July 17th, 2010 at 10:14 am
I am fortunate that I can see all kinds of night sky traffic, living just outside the Mojave Desert. I just love it, I can’t keep my eyes off the night sky. Oh ya, thanks for the PIC!
August 14th, 2010 at 7:34 am
[...] photographs via the Bad Astronomy blog at Discover magazine: the ISS and Space Shuttle Atlantis transit across the sun and Aurora australis as seen from the [...]
January 6th, 2011 at 9:41 am
[...] Now, this is just cool. 06 01, 2011 [...]
August 17th, 2011 at 3:23 am
[...] May 19, 2010 via blogs.discovermagazine.com [...]