First image of a transit of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in front of the Sun ever taken, from the area of Jacksonville (Florida, USA) on December 8th 2007 at 12:18 local time.

Takahashi FSQ-106 refractor (diameter 106mm, final focal 2000mm), Baader helioscope and Canon 5D. Exposure of 1/6000s at 100 ISO, extracted from a series of 14 images (3 images/s) started 2s before the predicted time. The HST is visible on 4 images of the series.
Transit forecast (place, time) calculated by www.calsky.com.
Transit duration: 1.2s. Transit bandwidth on Earth: 14.3 km. HST distance to observer: 926 km. Speed: 7.3km/s. HST maximum size: 13m.

The two sunspots groups are the last ones of the solar cycle number 23. The solar cycle number 24 began in January 2008 with the apparition of a the first high latitude reversed-polarity sunspot.

These images are under copyright (Thierry Legault/Look-at-Sciences). According to laws about image property, a link to this page is allowed but any public use (web site, television, magazine etc.) of one of these images is possible only after explicit consent of the author. Any violation will be subject to prosecution.

Half resolution image (pass the mouse over the image for a mark showing the position of HST):

100% crop of the field including HST (close to the lower left corner):

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