Hubble Space Telescope

space

Only image ever taken of a transit of a space shuttle (Atlantis) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in front of the Sun, during the last repair mission of Hubble, obtained from Florida at 100 km south of the Kennedy Space Center on May 13th 2009 12:17 local time, several minutes before grapple of Hubble by Atlantis.

Transit duration: 0.8s. Transit bandwidth on Earth: 5.6 km. Altitude: 600 km. Speed: 7 km/s (25000 km/h). Length of Atlantis : 35m, length of Hubble : 13m. Transit forecast (place, time…) calculated by www.calsky.com. Special thanks to Chuck Shaw (SM4 Mission Director) and to Arnold Barmettler (Calsky) for their invaluable efforts to provide the accurate data essential to successful transit images. And many thanks to everyone at the KSC press site for their help and their kindness.

Takahashi TOA-130 refractor (diameter 130mm, final focal 2200mm or 3400mm) on Manfrotto video tripod, Baader solar prism and Canon 5D mark II. Exposure of 1/8000s at 100 ISO, extracted from a series of 16 images (4 images/s) started 2s before the predicted time.

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