A photographer captured a rare shot of the International Space Station (ISS) as it whizzed past Jupiter.
“This photograph had been on my radar for nearly two years, and this past Sunday, I finally brought it to life after driving over an hour north of Seattle to Burlington, Washington, just before sunrise,” AJ Smadi tells PetaPixel.
Remarkably, the ISS and Jupiter appear nearly identical in angular size, a coincidence caused by the fact that Jupiter was approximately 1.3 million times wider than the ISS, yet also 1.3 million times farther away at the moment of capture.
“Every month or so for the past couple years, I would check the ISS’s path across the sky and see if it would be close enough to any planets that I could align them from within Washington State,” Smadi says.
“At precisely 6:03 AM PDT, the International Space Station zipped directly past the gas giant Jupiter. After I carefully calculated the exact location from which to observe the transit, I managed to capture both objects in a single frame.”
“Within this photograph are seven human beings aboard the ISS (Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk, Sergey Teteryatnikov, Pyotr Dubrov, Anil Menon, and Anna Kikina),” Smadi adds.
“Far beyond them lies a detailed view of Jupiter with its storms and belts, accompanied by all four Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.”
The photos of the ISS and Jupiter are part of an ongoing series Smadi calls “ISS Meets.” The astrophotographer has previously captured Venus and the orbital lab, as well as Saturn and Mars.
“As far as I’m aware, I have the only known ISS-Venus transits ever recorded, and have also captured it alongside Saturn and Mars,” Smadi says. “This week, I finally got the opportunity to photograph it with Jupiter.”
Aside from the distant planets of Uranus and Neptune, Mercury is the only planet left in the Solar System that Smadi hasn’t captured.
Smadi used a 9.25-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope that has a focal length of 2,350mm. The camera was a ZWO ASI662MC that uses Sony’s IMX662 sensor. He also used a UV/IR filter to block out ultraviolet and infrared light.
More of Smadi’s work can be found on his Instagram and Reddit.
Image creditsAJ Smadi.
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