The ultimate photobomb: NASA spied the Space Station crossing the eclipsing sun
A cool thing happened in the sky today: the moon covered the sun, and people got super emotional about it.
While we watched from Earth, either with special glasses. cardboard boxes. or with our own scorched retinas, astronauts got to see the eclipse from another perspective.
And we got to see them creeping across the sun, thanks to a NASA photographer. Look at it... it's pretty awesome.
In photos taken by a NASA photographer located in the Northern Cascades National Park in Washington, the International Space Station is seen in silhouette as it transits the sun at roughly five miles per second during a partial phase of the solar eclipse, Monday, Aug. 21, 2017.
Compared to the size of the sun and the moon, the ISS resembles an ant crawling across a luminescent piece of cheese, or a TIE fighter roaring across an orange Death Star.
Here's a composite image made from four different frames.
The video at the top of this story, taken by NASA's Joel Kowsky, shows the space station crossing the sun at five miles per second. It was taken by a high speed camera that captured images at 1,500 frames per second.
Feel free to make a badass TIE fighter sound effect as you watch.
People in the United States won't get to experience a total solar eclipse again until 2024. Better buy your glasses now before they skyrocket in price.
Keith Wagstaff is an assistant editor at Mashable and a terrible Settlers of Catan player. He has written for TIME, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, NBC News, The Village Voice, VICE, GQ and New York Magazine, among many other reputable and not-so-reputable publications. After nearly a decade in New York City, he now lives in his native Los Angeles.
