Shuttle Atlantis and the ISS

How about these suckers for cool astronomy photos: The Space Shuttle Atlantis performing its inspection just off of the International Space Station in transit across the sun!

From Thierry Legault: Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis (50 minutes after undocking from the ISS, before return to Earth), taken from the area of Mamers (Normandie, France) on september 17th 2006 at 13h 38min 50s UT. Takahashi TOA-150 refractor (diameter 150mm, final focal 2300mm), Baader helioscope and Canon 5D. Exposure of 1/8000s at 50 ISO, extracted from a series of 14 images (3 images/s) started 2s before the predicted time.www.calsky.com. Transit duration: 0,6s. Transit band width on Earth: 7.4 km. ISS distance to observer: 550 km.

It's worth checking out the full-resolution photo here.

peed: 7.4km/s. ISS size: 73m. Distance between ISS and Atlantis: 200m