International Space Station Crossing the Moon

Thierry Legault is an engineer and astrophotographer living near Paris. Big city skies are notoriously bad for stargazing due to the light pollution, so he drove 155 miles to a remote spot in the countryside of Bourges, France to perform his hobby. And on that night, something extraordinary happened.

Despite foggy weather, Legault managed to capture the split second when the International Space Station passed through the moon. The moment was photographed in such great detail that you can make out the spaceship’s solar panels.  

Legault wrote in a Facebook Post:

Many modules and spacecrafts are visible, in particular the SpaceX Crex-3 Dragon.

I had to ride 250 km from home and find a remote place in the countryside in the center of the transit path, in the middle of the night between the blankets of fog.As shown by the video, the transit (prepared on www.transit-finder.com) lasted only 1/2 second, at the speed of 27000 km/h.

Tycho crater near the ISS is 85 km wide and one of the youngest craters on the Moon ("only" 100 million years old). The large surrounding rays were caused by the impact of an asteroid comparable in size to the body that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The image is so impressive that even senior NASA photographer Bill Ingalls praised it while retweeting the snapshot. Of course, there are also naysayers who doubted the authenticity of the picture, but Legault chose to see it as a compliment: if it seems too good to be true then he must’ve done a great job at capturing it.

Image: Thierry Legault​

#ISS #InternationalSpaceStation #Moon #LunarTransit #ThierryLegault

Source: Astrophotography, Legault's official website