If you want to catch a glimpse of the International Space Station passing by the moon in real life, you better have some patience, because it doesn't happen all that often. And when it does, you'll only have a fraction of a second to catch it before it's gone.
Fortunately for those of us with short attention spans, we have the next best thing. Stunning new images show the silhouette of the ISS zooming by the face of the moon.
The photos were taken in Australia by astrophotographer Dylan O'Donnell, who said he waited about 12 months for the opportunity to shoot the stunning images. Luckily, he didn't cave under pressure when the big moment arrived.
O'Donnell said he's signed up on the CalSky website to receive alerts for potential flyovers. After waiting about a year, he finally received one last week. So, he attached his Canon 70D to the rear cell of his Canon 70D, and waited.
"If you think that it might be a case of sitting there with your camera and a clock, with one hand on the shutter release, you'd be absolutely correct!" he wrote in a blog post. "The ISS only passed over the moon for 0.33 seconds as it shoots by quite quickly. Knowing the second it would pass I fired a "burst" mode of exposures then crossed my fingers and hoped it would show up in review — and it did!"
The shutter speed on his camera was set at a quick 1/1650th of a second and ISO 800 to freeze the ISS in motion, he said.
As for how he edited the photos, O'Donnell said he "took about a second of further exposures on either side of the pass to stack the lunar surface detail using AutoStakkert2," then increased the saturation to create the color-enhanced version you see at the top of this story. "The colors on the moon relate to the chemical composition of moon geology," he wrote.