Wow! Shuttle And Space Station Photographed Crossing The Sun
An eye-popping new snapshot taken by a Florida photographer has caught the International Space Station and shuttle Atlantis in silhouette as both spaceships crossed in front of the sun.
Photographer Thierry Legault took the stunning photo on May 16 from Madrid, Spain at 13:28 GMT (9:28 a.m. EDT) shortly before Atlantis docked at the space station.
In the photo, the shuttle and space station can clearly be seen as two separate spacecraft.
They appear as dark silhouettes in the upper right region of an otherwise bright yellow sun. Even the wings of Atlantis can be discerned along with the station's expansive solar arrays as both flew 200 miles (354 km) above Earth.
When Legault took the photo, Atlantis was flying below the space station and about to perform an orbital back flip so astronauts inside the station could snap high-resolution photos of the thousands of heat-resistant tiles lining the shuttle's belly.
Catching the scene is can be extremely tricky, Legault said.
"For me, besides having the right equipment for such a shot, the difficulty is to be perfectly prepared," Legault told SPACE.com in an e-mail. "This includes a lot of training and serious preparation."
It took just 1/2 a second for Atlantis and the space station to zip across the face of the sun. The solar crossing, called a transit, was only visible from a 3-mile (5-km) wide corridor beneath the flight path of both spaceships, Legault said.
"The excitement is like during a total eclipse, except that the [viewing corridor] is much smaller and the duration too," Legault explained. "So there is no chance of mistake. The possibility comes once only and if you miss it, it's over."
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