NASA releases stunning image of ISS in front of the Sun

Alex Lasker

By: Patrick Jones, Buzz60

Do you ever just stop and think just how incredible it is that we as human beings have a full time space station circling our planet?

Sure, what we've seen in Star Wars and Star Trek looks better but I hate to break it to you, they're not real, the international space station is.

And, we show it off as we should. Most recently NASA shared a photo of the iSS moving in front of the sun.

Here it is, it's a composite image taken from ten frames as the international space station passes in front of the sun at 5 miles per second with six astronauts on it and it's pretty incredible.

This composite image, made from ten frames, shows the International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, in silhouette as it transits the sun at roughly five miles per second, Saturday, Dec. 17, 2016, from Newbury Park, California. Onboard as part of Expedition 50 are: NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson: Russian cosmonauts Andrey Borisenko, Sergey Ryzhikov, and Oleg Novitskiy: and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)


NASA

In case you didn't know, the space station is 357.6 feet long was built by 16 different nations and is essentially the most expensive objects ever built with a cost of about 120 billion dollars.

Its normal altitude is 249 miles above the surface of the earth, essentially the same distance as Buffalo, New York and Detroit, Michigan.

The image taken from Newbury Park in California really is stunning. The scale provides so much context to how far we've come and yet how far we have left to go in our goal of exploring our universe.

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