Stunning image captures NASA’s ISS crossing the moon
Stunning image captures NASA’s ISS crossing the moon
By Brandon Russell | August 3, 2015
That’s not the mark of Zorro slashed across the moon. If you look closely—no, closer—that little spec in the middle is actually the International Space Station. Pretty spectacular, no? The scale is absolutely phenomenal; the ISS is about the size of a football field, so it gives you an idea of moon’s relatively small stature.
Taken by senior NASA photographer Bill Ingalls, the image captured the ISS crossing the moon’s face at about 5 miles per second. Not 5 miles per hour; 5 miles per second. That gave Ingalls the briefest of windows to capture the spacecraft.
Even more spectacular about the image is the kind of conditions that are necessary to get a clear shot. You need to have a clear sky, of course, but also the patience to sit there until the ISS comes zooming across the sky. Five miles per second is remarkably fast—but at that size and that distance, if you blink it’ll be gone.
A similar image was actually captured back in July, and that one was a little more defined as to what you’re looking at. What makes this one so cool is that the space station’s silhouette looks like a tiny Z, almost like a reminder of human ingenuity stamped on the moon’s cratered face.
More:
http://www.technobuffalo.com/2015/08/03/stunning-image-captures-nasas-iss-crossing-the-moon/
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Space Station Crosses the Moon in Awesome NASA Photos
by Sarah Lewin, Staff Writer | August 03, 2015 05:22pm ET
The International Space Station can be seen streaking across the face of the moon in
this composite of nine different images captured by NASA photographer Bill Ingalls, all
in just .82 seconds, on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2015. He was observing from Woodford,
Virginia. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
Just two days after the second full moon of July created a so-called blue moon, a NASA photographer captured some stunning views of the International Space Station zipping across the lunar landscape.
When the space station soared between the moon and Earth at around 5 miles per second (8 kilometers per second) Sunday night (Aug. 2), NASA photographer Bill Ingalls was in position to capture the sight from Woodford, Virginia. Ingalls had two hours to set up four cameras after driving to his pre-calculated observing location. He then had only .82 seconds to snap the shots as the tiny silhouette of the space station passed by.
During the brief lunar transit by the space station, Ingalls took a sequence of nine photographs at 11 frames per second using a 1200 millimeter lens. During his setup, Ingalls also created a light message to spell out ISS - NASA's acronym for the space station - in a long-exposure image [Photos: Spotting Spaceships and Satellites from Earth]
It's what you do when you are set up 2hrs in advance of a 0.82 of a second photo op!" Ingalls wrote on Twitter, where he posts his photography as @ingallsimages.
More:
http://www.space.com/30141-space-station-crosses-moon-nasa-photos.html
lolwut
So the space station is going to subtend a hell of a lot wider angle at 1/1000's the distance to the moon than it would if it were on or just above the moon's surface.
Kind of like me saying i can hold my arm out and with my hand more than cover the moon, so this shows how small the moon really is. Not enough green cheese to make going there worthwhile IMHO
Or if a cloud covers the moon, this shows that the moon is smaller than a cloud. Q.E.D.
If you overlay the United States onto the surface of the moon.
That football fields are actually that big.
In the article "cratered face" caught my attention. I noticed that most of the craters are on the south end of the moon, so I did a search for the "far side" of the moon, Whoa! there's some real heavy impact there. So has the earth acted as a blocker for a lot of the impacts? Inquiring minds wanna know.
