Monday 18 May 2009

ATLANTIS SOLAR TRANSIT

This beautiful photograph caught my eye on Flickr here. It is not a fly on a grapefruit! It is, rather, an awesome photograph, taken last week, of the space shuttle Atlantis in between earth and the sun as it is on its way to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.


The NASA site with other photos is here * but the photo is not theirs, i.e. it was taken by this French photographer, M. Thierry, whose website is here. (He is an 'astrophotographer'.)

The UK Times has an article here about the repair.

Discussion on how such a photo taken with a telescope and a sun filter is on the NASA site. Is it for real? Yes! Is it 'Photoshopped'? No!

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* This photograph is a cropped image "as seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope."

Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

1 comment:

Vagabonde said...

That photograph is quite amazing. Thanks for giving the link to Thierry Legault’s web page. I bookmarked it. It looks like he has many other impressive photos in it.