Space station and Saturn

[Rocket Pooch]

This is either a fake or something cool.

http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2004/06apr04/Edelmann1.gif

[JohnP]

Has to be a fake!

[Mike]

It's a fake. In an exposure short enough to capture Saturn, you wouldnt get the moons anyway so that part is a mosaic.

[Rocket Pooch]

I thought it was a fake as well.

[Rick]

There's no good reason why it shouldn't be possible to photograph Saturn and ISS in the same frame, and they could be about the same apparent brightness, so all that'd be needed would be sufficiently accurate predictions (and probably a lot of luck). I'm not sure what the relative angular sizes of ISS and Saturn should be though.

Was there a link to a page giving any details about how the image was created? If it were possible to examine each frame individually then it might be possible to make a reasonable assessment as to whether it's genuine, but the animation makes that difficult....

[Ian]

we also used to consider it not possible to capture Jupiters moons at the same time as seeing detail on the planetary disc. However, that said, while I think that Saturn and the ISS have an apparent magnitude similar to each other, my doubts would certainly remain around capturing so many of the moons that clearly.

Who made the image? Do they have a history of ISS imaging, like Jon Locker for example?

[Rocket Pooch]

I just got it off the uk-astroimaging site, I have no idea what or who did it.

[Rick]

I took a look at http://www.spaceweather.com, and found some stuff on their archived page for 6th April 2004:

SPACE STATION FLYBY: On April 1st, Torsten Edelmann of Landsberg, Germany, photographed a rare and beautiful close encounter ... between Saturn and the ISS:

[The image under discussion]

"This is no April Fool's joke," says Edelmann, who recorded the event using a Celestron C9.25 telescope and a Phillips Toucam digital camera. "The two frames showing the ISS are just 1/15s apart! I processed the image of Saturn separately to enhance the planet's faint moons."

[Rick]

I'd still like to see the individual (original) images....