Bill Ingalls is NASA's favorite photographer. Or more properly speaking, he is the "Senior Contract Photographer for NASA Headquarters."
Which means he takes incredible pictures. Many of the most popular images you've seen of NASA's spacecraft and views of celestial bodies from Earth (the moon, a star-filled sky, etc.) come from Ingalls.
On August 2, 2015, Ingalls accomplished something that's almost impossible. He captured images of the International Space Station traveling across the night sky, just as it passed in front of the moon. This amazing sight has been photographed a few times before, because it's crazy hard to do. How hard?
Less-than-one-second hard.
Not only do you need utterly perfect night sky conditions, you have to be ready to snap the picture with hair-trigger timing. According to Ingalls, the transit time of the ISS in front of the moon's surface was approximately .82 of a second.
At first glance, the ISS might not be easy to see. It's pretty tiny, like a miniature letter "Z" that zips across the surface. To give you the full effect, NASA even pieced Ingall's images together to create an animated GIF of the ship's speedy flight across the sky.
Animated #gif of @Space_Station transiting the moon early this morning. #ISScrew #SpotTheStation #NASA pic.twitter.com/e5Q2hDjPME
— NASA HQ PHOTO (@nasahqphoto) August 2, 2015
The International Space Station is, at the time of this writing, home to six astronauts. Seeing it's miniscule form pass over the moon's surface is an impressive reminder of the size, scale and distance of objects in space.
h/t C-Net
