Every so
often, astrophotography delivers a coincidence too good to script. On a day in
June, photographer Petr Horalék was in Prašek, Czech Republic, with his camera
trained on the Sun. He already knew a handful of sunspots would be visible,
dark blotches caused by concentrated magnetic fields that had been sitting on
the solar disk for weeks. He also knew the International Space Station would
cross the Sun’s face at a precise, sub-second window, and he timed his shot for
exactly that transit.
What he didn’t plan for showed up anyway: an airplane,
climbing into frame at just the right moment, added its own silhouette to the
picture and briefly ran its own miniature partial eclipse across the solar
disk.
The result is a single image carrying three separate
silhouettes at once: the sunspots (expected), the ISS (planned down to the
second), and the airplane (pure chance). Horalék estimates the odds of any
random image from that location capturing both a space station and an airplane
against the Sun at about 30 million to one.
It’s a good reminder of how much precision goes into
the astrophotography shots that look effortless: the sunspots take weeks to
plan around, the ISS transit takes sub-second timing, and the airplane takes
nothing but luck.
Source:
Original post — Petr Horalék, via NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, September 22, 2026.
Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horalek / Inst. Physics Opava
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