Friday, May 15, 2009

There's people out there...

This is a picture of the sun taken by Thierry Legault on May 13 in Florida. It was a cloudy day and he used a 13 cm telescope, and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera that took a series of 16 images of 1/8000th of second each.


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Cool. But look closely at the lower left quadrant. See those two specs? Here, look closer.


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That's the space shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope silhouetted in transit across the sun. Isn;t that amazing? There are people in there. Working, breathing, living people.

This guy Legault also took the shot below of just Atlantis in between us and the sun. I mean, holy shit! Out among the stars!


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Thanks to Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog where you can see cool stuff like this all the time.

10 comments:

Rog said...

Dude, seriously, a lot of puff pieces. Where's the anger? Don't get me wrong, love the space and fish stuff, just looking for some good old fashioned venting.

Domino Bianchi said...

Wondering if he knew it was there when he took the picture? What a lucky break, otherwise!

Tim Foil said...

Domino - They wronte this up in the Wired Science Blog and he DID know. What's even crazier is that the shuttle took just 8 seconds to transit the sun...a pretty short window for a pretty amazing picture.

molly said...
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Tim Foil said...
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Tim Foil said...
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Domino Bianchi said...
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Tim Foil said...
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Domino Bianchi said...
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Domino Bianchi said...
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