Every so often, astrophotography delivers a coincidence too good to script. On a day in June, photographer Petr Horalék was in Prašek, Czech Republic, with his camera trained on the Sun. He already knew a handful of sunspots would be visible, dark blotches caused by concentrated magnetic fields that had been sitting on the solar disk for weeks. He also knew the International Space Station would cross the Sun’s face at a precise, sub-second window, and he timed his shot for exactly that transit.

What he didn’t plan for showed up anyway: an airplane, climbing into frame at just the right moment, added its own silhouette to the picture and briefly ran its own miniature partial eclipse across the solar disk.

The result is a single image carrying three separate silhouettes at once: the sunspots (expected), the ISS (planned down to the second), and the airplane (pure chance). Horalék estimates the odds of any random image from that location capturing both a space station and an airplane against the Sun at about 30 million to one.

It’s a good reminder of how much precision goes into the astrophotography shots that look effortless: the sunspots take weeks to plan around, the ISS transit takes sub-second timing, and the airplane takes nothing but luck.

Source:
Original post — Petr Horalék, via NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, September 22, 2026.

Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horalek / Inst. Physics Opava