Posted on by Jason Major

ISS Caught Between the Moon and New York City

The ISS passes across the face of a daytime Moon. © Alan Friedman.

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Now as the theme from Arthur plays in your head you can enjoy this GIF animation of the ISS passing across the face of a daytime Moon, photographed by Alan Friedman from his location in upstate New York.

I know it’s crazy, but it’s true.

Alan captured these images at 10:30 a.m. EST back on September 2, 2007, and slowed down the animation a bit; in real-time the event lasted less than half a second. (Click the image for an even larger version.)

Atmospheric distortion creates the “wobbly” appearance of the Moon.

Alan Friedman is a talented photographer, printer (and avid vintage hat collector) living in Buffalo, NY. His images of the Sun in hydrogen alpha light are second-to-none and have been featured on many astronomy websites. When he’s not taking amazing photos of objects in the sky he creates beautiful hand-silkscreened greeting cards at his company Great Arrow Graphics.

See more of Alan’s astrophotography on his website, Averted Imagination.

Image © Alan Friedman. All rights reserved.

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NOTE: Although this article previously stated that the images were taken Jan. 12, 2012, they were actually captured in September 2007 and re-posted on Jan. 13 of this year. Alan states that he’s since learned how to judge exposure so the ISS doesn’t appear as a streak, but personally he likes (as do I) how this one came out.

Let’s see… September 2007… that would have been Expedition 15!

Posted on by Jason Major

Ride Along with Rhea

Animation made from raw Cassini image data acquired April 25, 2011

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Assembled from 29 raw images taken by the Cassini orbiter on Monday, April 25, this animation brings us along an orbital ride with Rhea as it crosses Saturn’s nighttime face, the planet’s shadow cast across the ringplane. Sister moons Dione and Tethys travel the opposite lane in the background, eventually appearing to sink into Saturn’s atmosphere.

Rhea's heavily cratered surface, imaged by Cassini on October 2010. NASA/JPL/SSI

The exposure varies slightly from frame to frame due to the fact that they are not all taken with the same color channel filter.

Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles, wide), Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles wide) and Tethys (1,066 kilometers, or 662 miles wide) are all very similar in composition and appearance. The moons are composed mostly of water ice and rock, each covered in craters of all sizes and crisscrossed by gouges, scarps and chasms. All three are tidally locked with Saturn, showing the same face to their parent planet in the same way that the Moon does with Earth.

The Cassini spacecraft was 2,227,878 km (1,384,339 miles) from Rhea when the images were taken.

(The original images have not been validated or calibrated. Validated/calibrated images will be archived with the NASA Planetary Data System in 2012.)

Image credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute. Animation by Jason Major.