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Photo: Mad Dash to Catch Space Shuttle Crossing the Sun
Intrepid astrophotographer Alan Friedman raced against time to reach exactly the right spot at the right fraction of a second to snap this stunning photo of the International Space Station, with the Space Shuttle Discovery attached, crossing the sun.
Friedman drove 1,800 miles from his home in Buffalo, New York to the annual Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys, “for the steady skies, warm temperatures and the company of good astronomy friends,” he wrote on his website. “But when I heard that the ISS would transit the sun nearby … I had to give it a try.”
The transit would be visible at 2:39 p.m. on March 1 from a location 20 miles to the north of the star-party site. The entire crossing would last just 0.2 seconds. Friedman was scheduled to give a talk about astrophotography from 12:30 to 1:30 pm. As soon as his talk was over, Friedman jumped in the car with fellow astrophotographers Brian Shelton and Mark Beale and raced after the sun.
“We got set up just in time to catch it,” Friedman wrote. “I underestimated the narrowness of this event … another 500 feet and we would have missed it entirely. Lucky day!”
Friedman shoots his startlingly sharp sun photos with a 3.5-inch telescope he calls Little Big Man and a filter that only lets in light emitted by hydrogen. He then inverts the images, making the light spots dark and the dark spots light, which gives the sun a swirling, textured appearance.
Most of the time, Friedman shoots the sun from his backyard. “I think that is a real fascination with my work,” he said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “With all the wonderful satellites and missions out there taking close-up images of our solar system neighbors … it is still possible to do it yourself and even come up with something magical now and again.”
While in Florida, Friedman also caught a puff of plasma detaching from the edge of the sun (below). Although it looks serene, such plasma clouds can weigh tens of billions of tons, and can flood the inner solar system with hot, charged matter if they detach from the sun for good.
Images: Alan Friedman
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