This week's solar eclipse has been in headlines for weeks if not more, but I saw references today to something I hadn't heard of until this afternoon.
The orbiting International Space Station passed between the Earth and the moon. When a person jumps in the way of photo you're taking that's referred to as photobombing, but that's not an astronomical term. In this photo, you can see the ISS captured in 8 frames of video that make up the video of the transit. I have no idea why a couple of frames appear to be missing. Starting at the left edge, just below the midline of the sun, there's an image of the ISS practically on the limb of the sun. Count six after that and you're close to exactly the middle of the image. If you use the same spacing as the group you just counted, two ISS images are missing, then there's another ISS image. The two dark spots, one near the left limb of the sun and one just above the fourth ISS image from the left limb are sunspots.
The silhouette of the ISS transiting across the sun's face during the Aug. 12, 2026 total solar eclipse. (Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky) Image cropped, exposure stretched, and resultant enlarged here.
The original source article at Space.com includes a short video, looping or replaying, of the ISS moving from right to left in that image in eight frames.
Space.com's author, Chelsea Gohd, closes with this little note:
And while the ISS is featured in this image, we may also want to consider the astronauts aboard. In other words, people on Earth weren't the only ones who got to participate in the marvel.
The Expedition 75 astronauts on the ISS (NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Anil Menon, and Jack Hathaway; ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot; and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov, Andrey Fedyaev and Anna Kikina) caught the show too as they orbited our planet. There they were, in between Earth and the moon, as our planet's neighbor blocked out our star.
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