STS-134 and the ISS. Click for larger. Image credit: Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch.

Check this out!

Have you ever tried to image the ISS?  I have on several occasions and I can tell you it is very difficult to say the least. Everything has to be just perfect, you need to know exactly where it will be at a certain time, point your instruments in that direction, the camera has to track perfectly and at the proper speed to keep the ISS in frame and IMHO the hardest part is to get a focused image.  Yeah the focus sounds like it would be the easiest part but in practice it usually turns out quite different.  Oh then there are exposure times and on it goes.

Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch: “Passage of the International Space Station and Endeavour, taken on May 29th 2011 at 3:55UT from the area of Pau, France, after installation of the AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer). The video is accelerated 2.5 times (acquisition at 10 fps, video at 25 fps). The altitude of the ISS is 360 km (200 miles), for a size of a hundred metres. The speed of ISS is 17,000 miles per hour and its angular speed at zenith is 1.3º per second.”

So hopefully you get a feeling for how difficult it was for Thierry Legault and Emmanuel Rietsch remarkable this image is and how even more remarkable the other photos, animations and even 3D images are.  Have a look.