Absolutely Amazing: ISS, Discovery Transit Sun Near Active Sunspot Region

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Amateur astronomer Catalin Fus from Poland has captured one of the most amazing images I’ve ever seen – and his timing was impeccable. On March 7th at 13:05:49 UTC, just after space shuttle Discovery had undocked from the International Space Station, the two ships flew in formation directly in front of the Sun, as seen from Fus’ location just outside of Krakow. With his solar-filtered telescope focused on active sunspot region 1166, he found there were a couple extra spots in his image – Discovery and the ISS. Given that this was Discovery’s final mission in space and final visit to the ISS, this image has historical significance, as well as just being absolutely fantastic. Keep in mind that transits like this last just over a half a second.

He used the following equipment:

Telescope : 102mm f6.3 GPU oilspaced apochromat
self-made Herschel Prism + Meade TeleXtender 2x 1.25”
Mount: Losmandy G11
Camera: Canon EOS 550D
1frame @ ISO 100, 1/1000s
With just a touch of post processing done in PixInsight and PS CS5

Cropped version of the ISS/Discovery/sunspont conjunction. Credit: Catalin Fus. Used by permission.

You can see more Fus’ handiwork at his website, www.catalinfus.ro. Our thanks to Catalin for allowing Universe Today to post his incredible image.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

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