Dramatic Photos Show ISS Silhouetted Against Sun, Moon

NASA photographer nails photo shoot despite cloudy skies and the need for split-second timing.

Call it a double helping of celestial inspiration.

Just weeks after releasing a dramatic photo of the International Space Station passing in front of the moon, NASA has offered up an equally eye-popping image of the ISS transiting the sun.

(Story continues below images.)

This NASA image shows the International Space Station silhouetted against the sun.

This NASA image shows the International Space Station silhouetted against the sun.

NASA/Bill Ingalls
This NASA photo shows the ISS silhouetted against the moon.

This NASA photo shows the ISS silhouetted against the moon.

NASA/Bill Ingalls

The new image is actually a composite of five photos of the ISS snapped by Bill Ingalls, a NASA photographer based in Washington, D.C. Ingalls took the photos from Shenandoah National Park in Front Royal, Virginia on Sept. 6, 2015.

It wasn't an easy shoot.

"Not unlike a rocket launch, there is a lot of prep work that goes into making a photo that is only a thousandth of a second or less," Ingalls told The Huffington Post in an email. "This total solar transit was only 0.6 of a second in length and I was lucky to get five frames shooting at 10 frames per second."

Ingalls, who warns against looking at or pointing a camera at the sun without a solar filter, had to work fast because the ISS and the nine crew members now on board are orbiting the Earth at a speed of about 17,500 miles per hour (5 miles per second).

What's more, Ingalls said, there were clouds in the sky when the new photos were taken--but he was "lucky again that they were out of the way at the correct time."

Lucky or not, Ingalls certainly nailed the shots.

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