Astrophoto: A Man-Made Sunspot

The International Space Station Transiting across the disc of the Sun on January 9, 2013. Credit: Efrain Morales

The Sun has been active recently along with showing several sunspots. But astrophotogher Efrain Morales captured an additional ‘man-made’ sunspot as the International Space Station transited across the face of the solar disk.

“It was a challenge as the Sun was low on the horizon at 19.5 deg. elevation, just above the canopy of the forest,” Efrain said via email, “along with and the ISS being over 250 miles distant from my location passing over Haiti at the time. His home base is the Jaicoa Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Equipment: SolarMax40, P/B CGE mount, Flea3 Ccd.

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Below, see an animation of the ISS transit:

Animation of the International Space Station Transiting across the disc of the Sun on January 9th at about 20:32 UTC. Credit: Efrain Morales.

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Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/