by Grania
WEIT regular Ben Goren sent Jerry this absolutely gorgeous shot of the moon with the ISS passing in front of it. The photograph was snapped from New South Wales, Australia.
Click through here to see the original image, and here to read the article in 9News by Chris Wilkinson.
Postscript: there are zero nightjars in this picture for reasons of being in space.
Actually…it’s a little known fact that nightjars are hard to see because they’re not actually there, having just teleported to outer space. That picture is full of nightjars!
…it’s also why they’re called, “nightjars”….
b&
The biggest nightjar of them all is the New Moon!
There may not be any nightjars but there is one man in the moon
Two. The one you’re thinking of, and at least one other.
So that’s where I left my binoculars!
🙂 Looks like an “M” (for moon)to my eyes, until I enlarged. Then I see the binocs.
Beautiful. I see from the link that it is a stacked photo, combining different color enhancements. That explains the unusually colorful moon.
Taking pictures of the ISS eclipsing the moon or the sun must be quite a challenge. One would have to have a way to calculate when it would happen, and quite possibly be ready to drive or even fly to be at the right spot to catch it since the relative spot of the ISS is not the same for different places on earth.
You can look up position / time information for many orbital devices, including ISS, on the internet. No need to figure it out yourself. I’m sure there are apps for your phone also.
But timing can be tricky even so in a shot like that because the thing in orbit moves through your field of view in a mere second or less. Spray and Pray. A lot of shots like that were not planned, just chance.
Back in the early 1990s you could get DOS-based programmes for calculating the ground track of occultations of stars by asteroids, planets and the Moon, and there by deducing your driving instructions. You could even get profile files for the lunar limb for many events, to try to improve profile knowledge for figure-of-the-Moon, orbital data etc from occultation data.
The most important thing for recording an occultation is an accurate time signal, which has been regularly available since the 1950s using various LW radio stations. The recommendation for the 1990s was to run a tape recorder while tuned into the radio station, and to record your observations on voice and the time signal on another track, which in post-processing could yield timings to ~0.1 seconds.
ISTR that the ephemerides I could get for the moon in the late 1990s couldn’t demonstrate the possibilty of grazing lunar occultations at Callanish stone circle ad various eopchs in the 3-4 thousands BCE. We were wondering if that could elucidate a suggested origin design for the stone circle.
No nightjars, but I do see an owl, standing alone next to the blue moon. x
I wonder what kind of telescope he has and if he did a stacked image. All of my photographs of the moon are more B&W/beige in colour so I’m surprised to see some of the blues in the moon.
Definitely a false color image, and with boosted contrast. Your photos are much closer to what you’d see out the window of a spaceship; this one is pretty emphatically not what you’d actually see.
(Nor, of course, was it intended to be realistic, and Dylan did a good job at processing.)
b&
Blue Moon?
Why, this is impossible! I saw a video on YouTube that says there is no ISS; it’s all done on a “green screen”, a hoax by that corrupt NASA to get our tax dollars! And remember, if you take the first “A” out of NASA, what does it spell……..?
How d’ya know there aren’t a few nightjars secreted aboard the ISS??
It’s the backup (plastic bags). When IT works, most of the time, the ISS is (has a permanent) a flying nightjar.
“It”. IPhone autocorrect for swedish…
The challenge is now on: someone needs to snap a photo of a nightjar, in flight, transitting the Moon.
Uh oh. Shades of Iron Sky.
Google Thierry Legault to see a fine display of orbiting satellites transiting the Moon -and- the Sun
See heavens-above.com to find out when orbiting satellites will be visible in your sky. The ISS is sometimes brighter than Venus.
Additionally, Iridium Flares are pretty cool. Iridium Flares are reflections from the antenna array of an Iridium communication satellite. There are over 60 of them in orbit and due to the size and shape of their antenna arrays their flares are unusually bright. Up to magnitude -9.5, and can last a few seconds. That is nearly as bright as the brightest comet of modern times. By comparison ISS at perigee, fully illuminated by the sun is magnitude -5.9.
I saw one once just because I happened to be looking at the night sky. I looked it up later and saw it was indeed an iridium flare like I thought. Pretty neat looking and very distinctive.
Very cool!