The Dutch Observatory

July 30, 2010 on 7:13 pm | In ISS, Satellites | Comments Off

It has been coming a long time.  An image of the ISS transitting our Sun.  The last attempt this past Monday failed because of last minute confusion about the time.  Today Frank Garner and I set out to capture this afternoon’s Sun transit of the ISS on its 67033 orbit since its launch on November 20, 1998.  The distance to the ISS was 405 kilometers.  The angular size of the satellite was 47.2″, which makes it 1/40th of the diameter of the Sun.  The ISS came close to Sunspot AR1092 and some nice solare proms are visible also.  We almost missed this pass as an object passed accross the field of view about 20 seconds prior to the ISS, which we first thought was an early pass.  We stuck to our imaging plan and caught the right pass on time. It also appears that the transfer between the camera and my laptop was quite busy, since it skipped a few images in the sequence.