If your friends are anything like mine, every single social app that encourages over-sharing is full of blurry eclipse photos right now. As it turns out, turning up the digital zoom to 11 isn’t the greatest way to capture a generational event, but luckily, NASA’s got you covered.
A NASA photographer captured this incredible eclipse photobomb during the partial eclipse. If you look closely, you can see the International Space Station transiting over the front of the sun, just before the moon blocks everything out.
ISS transits over the sun aren’t uncommon and often make for excellent photos, but it’s incredibly rare that you’re going to get the sun, moon, and space station all in one image. The other black dots you can see are sunspots on the surface of our local star, not dust on the lens.
Taking a telephoto image of the sun is challenging, and doubly so when you need the timing to get three objects in frame. Pointing an unprotected camera on the end of a telephoto lens at the sun can cause so much heat buildup that the camera melts and explodes, so photographers have to use special filters to get the image.
