Part of the art and science of astrophotography is figuring out when certain flying objects in the sky are going to line up for a photo opportunity.
And few photographs demonstrate it better than AJ Smadi’s shot of the International Space Station (ISS) hurtling in front of Jupiter. There’s an incredible symmetry in the dimensions here: Jupiter is about 1.3 million times bigger than the ISS, but it’s also around 1.3 million times further away.
Smadi planned the photograph for two years, diligently checking the path of the ISS against the movements of the gas giant. In fact, it’s the latest in a series of images he calls “ISS Meets,” for which he photographs the space station as it passes planets such as Venus and Saturn. (Next on Smadi’s list: “ISS Meets Mercury.”)
“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,” Smadi told PetaPixel. “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.”
As Smadi notes, there are seven people in the shot: Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk, Sergey Teteryatnikov, Pyotr Dubrov, Anil Menon, and Anna Kikina, the current residents of the ISS. As far as we know, there’s no one at home on Jupiter, but a wider angle also includes the four largest Jovian moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
Smadi used a 9.25-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope, with a focal length of 2,350 millimeters, for the shot. His camera was a ZWO ASI662MC, fitted with a Sony IMX662 sensor, and ultraviolet and infrared filters were employed to block out those wavelengths of light.
Calculating when objects will pass each other, working out the exact place on Earth to see it, and capturing a photo of the event within a window significantly shorter than a second—it’s all just part of the work that goes into the best astrophotography shots.
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Lead Image: AJ Smadi
