picture of the ISS with atlantis, AMAZING!

[sbfuller]

Thierry Legault - Transit of ISS and Atlantis in front of the Sun - The last mission of Atlantis


pictures are in the link.


Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis 50 minutes before docking, taken from the area of Madrid (Spain) on May 16th 2010 at 13h 28min 55s UT. Atlantis has just begun the "R-bar pitch maneuver": the shuttle performs a backflip that exposes its heat-shield to the crew of the ISS that makes photographs of it; since its approach trajectory is between the ISS and the Earth, this means that we are seeing Atlantis essentially from above, with the payload bay door opened.
Transit forecast calculated by www.calsky.com.
For this transit of a maximum duration of 0.54s, the visibility band crossed Spain, southern France, Northern Italy, Austria etc. This band was 4.8 km wide but being placed at its edge implies that the transit duration becomes zero, so in practice I had to be placed less than 1 km from the center of the band. The choice of central Spain has been deduced from the study of weather forecast and detailed maps on Google-Earth.
ISS distance to observer: 391 km. Speed in orbit: 7.4km/s (26500 km/h or 16500 mph).

Takahashi TOA-150 refractor (diameter 150mm, final focal 2500mm), Baader Herschel prism and Canon 5D Mark II. Exposure of 1/8000s at 100 ISO, extracted from a series of 16 images (4 images/s) started 2s before the predicted time

[CheaperKings]

Holy crap! That's cool as hell!...umm...I mean, Hey! That's a pretty neat shot.

[BEGM83]

*picks jaw up off the floor*

Nah nothing special.

[Jim Poor]

Could have used some fill flash to deal with the back-lighting

Pretty awesome stuff.

[Chip]

Did you use a tripod??

Friggin' remarkable. Beautiful work. Video is cool, too.

[JessicaO]

Wow!! I tried the 3d video but couldn't get my eyes to cross right.... But seriously amazing photos.