“Photographer captures stunning image of International Space Station crossing the surface of the sun”

Here’s a hint: the space station is located next to sunspots – areas of the sun’s surface that appear dark because they are colder than their surroundings.

“It almost gets lost in sunspots,” McCarthy told Insider.

The station appears to be on the surface of the Sun, but that is only because it is far from us: 250 miles above Earth.

Still don’t see it? Let’s grow a little.

He’s here:

The space station is just a simple silhouette against the Sun’s raging plasma.

As the sun becomes more active, this superheated material is repeatedly spewed into space, sometimes toward Earth, in volcanic eruptions called solar flares or coronal mass ejections.

In March, the solar flares that cause the Northern Lights, also known as the Northern Lights, made an unprecedented sighting as far south as Phoenix, Arizona. But they can also disrupt power grids, block radio signals, push satellites out of orbit, disrupt the Global Positioning System (GPS), and even damage technology on space stations.

McCarthy didn’t have any technical issues from the solar flares, but she did have issues of her own when taking this photo. It requires perfect timing balance, precise physics and a lot of persistence.

They are stranded in the desert to catch the space station

The space station often passes between Earth and the sun, but to get good pictures McCarthy needed it to be directly in the sky.

“Otherwise, the space station would be even lower on the horizon and smaller,” he said.

He recorded the exact date and time that he would be passing through the Arizona desert about two hours from his home. At the first opportunity, he loaded hundreds of pounds of equipment into his car and drove where he had calculated. He put up his telescope. Bright sky. He is ready to take pictures.

As the space station passes – less than half a second as it crosses the sun – a rogue cloud passes by and obscures the view.

McCarthy tried again another day. On the way, the tire exploded. Another attempt to storm the space station and the sun failed. But he was not deterred.

He changed his tires, hoping the rest of them would last a little longer, and headed back to the desert for his next crossover.

The space station streaks across the sun like a fast-moving needle in a haystack

McCarthy said it was 100 degrees that day. He parked the car and arranged his gear by the roadside. The telescope’s field of view was small to get a lot of detail, so he had to take hundreds of tiny shots of every part of the sun’s surface. He would stack them and stitch them into a mosaic for the final drawing.

“In bright sunlight I’m looking at the screen of this laptop and just trying to see, in featureless sunlight, where I should be pointing my telescope,” McCarthy said.

Use sunspots as a visual cue, knowing that the space station will pass in front of them.

“I plotted my position on the field by place [International Space Station] He said, “As long as I can get those sunspots in my field of vision, I’ll also get the International Space Station.”

In the background, McCarthy wanted to capture the fiery drama of the sun’s chromosphere, the thin layer of plasma between its visible surface (the photosphere) and the outermost layer of its atmosphere (the corona). In this layer, the temperature of the sun’s plasma reaches more than 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so hot that hydrogen emits a reddish glow. NASA. It is the chromosphere light that McCarthy wants to capture.

In an image of the chromosphere, McCarthy said, the sun looks like a “hairy ball” because of all the movement of the plasma.

But the space station appears in visible light. That’s why McCarthy needed three telescopes. One of them picks up the emission of “alpha hydrogen” from the chromosphere. The other two capture optical light of the space station’s resolution, their shadowy silhouettes standing out against the uniform glow of the sun’s outer atmosphere.

The telescope takes about 230 pictures per second.

“If I wasn’t shooting at a very fast rate, I would have completely missed it,” McCarthy said.

But he took dozens of raw photospheres from the space station, like the ones below, so he could stack them up to get the clearest shot of the big satellites.

Meanwhile, the Alfa Hydrogen Telescope has taken tens of thousands of close-up photos of the sun’s surface, pulling it together like a blanket.

As McCarthy was returning from the desert, another tire exploded. This time, when he got home, he replaced the three used tires.

“Fortunately, that didn’t happen on the way there,” he said. “At least I got a chance this time.”

While it’s fun to look at the space station in this photo, McCarthy doesn’t like the mix.

McCarthy said, “From a compositional standpoint, I think I could do better as an artist in how I framed that final take. So I’ll look for another one and think it will be better.”