See those two tiny specs in front of the Sun, there? The one on top is Space Shuttle Atlantis and right below it sits the Hubble Space Telescope.
Amateur astronomer Thierry Legault captured some great shots from here on Earth with his own telescope and a Canon 5D Mk II camera tricked out with a Baader solar prism, which makes the Sun look like a pleasant yellow racquetball instead of a retina-scorching ball of fire.
There’s an extreme zoom. Tiny, eh? If you’d like to take your own photos, you’ll need the following equipment:
- Canon 5D Mk II
- Takahashi TOA-130 refractor telescope with 2200mm lens
- Baader solar prism
- Celestial Observer website at CalSky.com
Here’s a large-format version of the photo: http://crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/atlantis_hst_2009may13_50.jpg
More photos available on Legault’s website: Transit of Atlantis and Hubble in front of the Sun
[via Gizmodo]
Somebody quick…. call the Department of Homeland Security and have this guy locked up. Don’t you know taking photos is illegal.
i call bs on this. i feel like there’s no way for us to see the spec of a tiny shuttle and an even tinier hubble from here on earth compared to the sun.
Anything to back up that “BS” claim? I’m not an astonomer or even an amateur one, but I guess you’d have to look at the number of acr-seconds the shuttle would subtend at 300 miles compared to the sun at roughly 93 million, a huge difference in distance. I do know that I can see my hand in front of my face, for example, and the shuttle is much bigger than my hand. With all the filtering being done, the shuttle seems to be basically a mask against the sun’s background. But, yeah, I have to admit that I’m surprised that one could get such a photo. I would have assumed that there’d be too much glare around the edges to distinguish anything. Some people say “why” (or “how”) and some people say “why not!” Anyway, I find it incredible that he got the pic, but I find it even more incredible that he would have faked it…so I choose to believe (for now). I’m also too lazy or ignorant to do the arc-second math.
Not BS this has been done many times in the past. All you need is a reasonable sized telescope. The moon is much smaller than the earth or the sun but the moon successfully occludes the sun during an eclipse. The shuttle is in an orbit much closer than the moon 350 miles. It is a matter of perspective.
The lens used to capture this is 2200mm that is 86 inches to Americans. 7.16 feet. That is a large enough telescope to resolve the planet Uranus, plenty large enough to see the shuttle and Hubble with all that back light supplied by the Sun. Trick is knowing where to look. Cheers!