Amateur astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy made the shot of a lifetime: the International Space Station zipping across the moon during daylight.
The sunbeam hitting the camera in broad daylight made observations difficult, but in the end, it was well worth it.
“This was a transit captured from my backyard this morning, and a difficult shot to capture since the moon was practically invisible against the glare of the sun,” McCarthy wrote in an Instagram post.
McCarthy also posted a video of the ISS transiting the moon. The space station flies at an average altitude of 248 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth. It circles the globe every 90 minutes at a speed of about 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h).
That’s almost ten times faster than a bullet. Even from Earth’s surface, the space station can be seen zipping past, exiting the picture’s frame in a matter of seconds. In fact, the footage you see on Instagram was actually slowed down so we can actually make sense of the transit.
“The transit against the lit portion of the moon lasted just a few hundredths of a second, shown here in a video slowed down roughly 6x,” McCarthy explained.