ISS captured passing in front of the Sun in an astonishingly epic video

The International Space Station (ISS) is truly a remarkable piece of the achievements of civilization, as humans quite literally have a floating laboratory in space that orbits the planet every 90 minutes.

Footage captured by professional astrophotographer Miguel Claro

Being able to orbit the planet every 90 minutes means the ISS is traveling extremely fast, precisely 17,900 mph, or 5 miles per second. For this reason, and it's altitude of 250 miles, its quite difficult to take a photo of the ISS, especially if you want its silhouette to appear in front of the Sun. Professional astrophotographer and science communicator Miguel Claro achieved this, and explained to Space.com his process.

The above video shows the ISS crossing in front of the Sun at a distance of 275 miles from Earth, and due to the speed of the ISS, Claro had to capture more than 200 images over for just two seconds of footage. Claro used a fast video camera from Player One Astronomy, the Apollo-M Max, and set the shutter to 109 images per second. Claro captured the footage on June 2, 2024, from Figueira da Foz on northern cost of Portugal.

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"The image shows the International Space Station (ISS) silhouette while crossing in front of the Sun´s disc at a distance of 441.54km from us at a speed of about 7.31km/s. The ISS completes an entire orbit around Earth each 90 minutes. Carrying on board astronauts, the large artificial satellite orbiting our planet with a width of 108.5 meters had an angular size of 62.58" seems although very small when compared with the Solar disc with an angular size of 31.6′ was actually 30.3 times larger than the ISS in the moment of the passage," wrote Claro under the video