ISS and Moon Share the Spotlight During Eclipse

For those of you complaining about your cell-phone camera, please consider this image before continuing to kvetch.

Captured by French photographer Thierry Legault in Oman, the silhouettes of the moon and International Space Station can be seen transiting across the sun’s disc on the morning of January 4th. Photographing a solar eclipse is already a daunting task, involving specialized filters and telescopes which Legault outlines on his website. On top of that, he needed to exercise precise timing as the ISS took a mere 0.86 seconds to cross in front of the sun.

And if that didn’t make your massive gallery of snapshots feel grossly inadequate, The Big Picture has a gallery of other fantastic photos from the first eclipse of 2011 that will surely put you to shame.

(Thierry Legault via Wired)