2026-09-22
Chance Triple Alignment: Plane, Space Station, Sun
The universe showed off again today: Chance Triple Alignment: Plane, Space Station, Sun. Here is what NASA captured:
Why this matters
What you're looking at ties directly to solar activity, the ISS, the night sky. Every frame the world's observatories capture adds another data point to humanity's slowly-assembling map of everything beyond our planet.
See it live on ObjectTracer
This connects to what you can track in real time on our 3D globe — explore Solar System view · ISS live tracker · Deep Space. Or open the live globe to watch flights, satellites, the ISS and spacecraft move right now.
The science, from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day
This shot captured an unexpected silhouette. Which is it? It isn't the sunspots, the small dark regions caused by concentrated magnetic fields visible around the Sun's bright disk. Sunspots typically last for weeks and were expected, since these spots were seen previously. It isn’t the International Space Station (ISS), the small dark structure on the middle left. This is because the featured picture was planned with sub-second timing to record the iconic structure passing before the Sun. It is the airplane. Just as this exposure was taking place in June, from Prasek in the Czech Republic, an airplane began its own miniature partial eclipse. The result is this triply aligned image of our Sun. The photographer estimates that the chance of any random Sun image containing silhouettes of both a space station and an airplane, from that location, is about 30 million to one. APOD's main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod
Image credit: Petr Horalek / Inst. Physics Opava · Source: NASA APOD