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- A stunning new photo shows the International Space Station passing in front of the moon.
- The ISS appears tiny against the moon’s vastness — and it’s almost 239,000 miles closer.
- Can you see the ISS? The photo has another Easter egg too — a site for future human moon landings.
The moon isn’t Earth’s only iconic satellite. The International Space Station is up there too, circling the planet 16 times each day. You just don’t see it.
A stunning new photo shows just how small the football-field-sized orbiting laboratory is compared to the moon.
Take a look:
Can you see the space station? Here’s a hint: It’s near the boundary between light and dark.
Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured this image of the ISS as its orbit carried it across the face of the moon, from his perspective in Arizona. The ISS is about 250 miles away, and the moon is about 239,000 miles away.
Let’s zoom in a little closer.
Do you see the ISS now? It’s right here, near the top:
“I think there’s a very nice juxtaposition,” McCarthy told Business Insider of the photo, adding that the ISS has “a haphazard-looking design with the way the radiators jut out and the solar panels jut out,” next to the moon’s rugged, natural craters.
It was daytime, which lends the image a “soft, pastel-y look,” he said.
The telescope almost missed it
Taking a photo like this is no easy feat.
To capture the few seconds when the ISS zoomed across the moon’s face, McCarthy said he had to drive three hours to set up his telescope and computer equipment in the right area and point it to exactly the right spot of the sky at exactly the right time.
Once he’d pulled over to the side of a dirt road and set up all his equipment, McCarthy said he was racing to solve technical problems and get the shot. The sun was bright, which made it difficult to see the computer screen where he was recording what his telescope saw.
“I had no idea if it was really in focus,” he said.
Then, one of his laptops died. No matter, McCarthy thought, because he had two different telescope-laptop-camera stations in case this happened. He sells prints of these photos, after all.
However, the second station’s camera wasn’t recording enough frames per second. By the time he’d swapped cameras, there were only two minutes left until the space station zoomed past — and his telescope was looking at the wrong part of the moon.
McCarthy recalled the final moments of his telescope drama: “I try to keep my cool, to slowly pan across the moon until I get to the area where I know the station is going to transit. The moment I get there, I see the station zip through the screen.”
McCarthy wasn’t sure if he’d gotten a crisp image until he reloaded the video, scanned through the 6,000 images in it to find the moment of the space station’s transit, and looked at each frame. He was relieved to see the result.
“It was amazing — like the best one I’ve ever done,” he said.
McCarthy stayed at the spot for another hour to slowly pan his telescope across the rest of the moon, capturing each portion of it in the same crisp, zoomed-in field of vision. He stacked and stitched together about 108,000 images to get a complete, high-resolution mosaic of the entire moon with the ISS.
NASA’s future moon-landing site
There’s another Easter egg in this photo, too. Near the top you can see Shackleton Crater on the lunar south pole.
NASA is eyeing the area around that 13-mile-wide depression for its next human moon landing — the first mission to put astronauts on the lunar surface since 1972.
Scientists believe that permanently shadowed craters on the lunar south pole are rich in frozen water, which will be a crucial resource for expanding further into deep space. Water can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to fuel rocket launches — perhaps enough fuel to launch from the moon to Mars.
The ISS, meanwhile, is aging and due for retirement in the 2030s. McCarthy’s new image shows two eras of space exploration — the space-station era coming to a close and the moon-base era that NASA and its business partners are forging anew.
“In this photo, you’re looking at the pinnacle of human ingenuity and engineering,” McCarthy said. “The space station has taught us so much about the human body, and it’s given us a lot of information that we’re going to use as we continue to pursue those seemingly impossible frontiers.”
