ISS and Discovery Transit the Sun
Image Credit & Copyright:
Anthony Ayiomamitis
That large sunspot
near the right edge of the Sun is actually not a sunspot at all.
It's the
International Space Station
(ISS) and the Space
Shuttle Discovery on mission
STS-114.
In the past, many
skygazers
have spotted the space station and space shuttles as bright
stars gliding through
twilight skies, still
glinting in the
sunlight while orbiting 200 kilometers or so above the
Earth's surface.
But here, astronomer Anthony Ayiomamitis took advantage of
a rarer opportunity to
record
the spacefaring combination moving quickly
in silhouette across the solar disk.
He snapped the picture on Thursday, July 28th from
Athens, Greece.
Launched
on Tuesday, Discovery
joined with
the ISS Thursday,
making the already large space station seem to
loom
even larger.