At 6:03 AM, the Space Station Crossed Jupiter in a Single Frame

At precisely 6:03 AM PDT on a Sunday, photographer AJ Smadi recorded the International Space Station passing directly in front of Jupiter — seven astronauts and a gas giant in one frame.

Smadi made the image near Burlington, Washington, about an hour north of Seattle, just before sunrise. He tells PetaPixel the shot had been on his radar for nearly two years. The alignment demanded that the station's orbital path cross Jupiter's position in the sky at a place he could reach from within Washington State.

The takeaway: this is a picture built on planning, not luck, and the planning took years.

Why the two objects look the same size

The most striking fact sits inside the frame itself. The station and Jupiter appear nearly identical in angular size. The reason is arithmetic, not illusion. Jupiter was roughly 1.3 million times wider than the ISS at the moment of capture. It was also 1.3 million times farther away. The two ratios cancel out, and the objects match on the sensor.

"Every month or so for the past couple years, I would check the ISS's path across the sky and see if it would be close enough to any planets that I could align them from within Washington State," Smadi says. He calculated the exact observing location for the transit, drove there, and waited for a window measured in moments rather than minutes.

The station moves fast. A transit like this rewards precise geometry and punishes guesswork.

What is actually in the picture?

The frame holds more than two bright dots. Seven people were aboard the station when Smadi pressed the shutter: Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk, Sergey Teteryatnikov, Pyotr Dubrov, Anil Menon, and Anna Kikina. That detail reframes the image. It is a portrait of a crew, taken from 400-odd kilometres of atmosphere away, against a planet 1.3 million times their spacecraft's width.

Jupiter itself shows structure — its storms and belts resolved in the capture. All four Galilean moons ride along in the same photograph: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

So the single frame compresses an entire solar-system scale, from a crewed outpost to the largest planet and its four major moons.

How the gear served the idea

Smadi worked with a 9.25-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope at a focal length of 2,350mm. The camera was a ZWO ASI662MC, built on Sony's IMX662 sensor. A UV/IR filter blocked ultraviolet and infrared light, keeping the planets' colors clean.

This is equipment chosen for a job. Long focal length resolves the station's silhouette against the disc. The filtered sensor holds detail in Jupiter's belts. Nothing here is about buying hardware; it is about matching tools to a two-year-old plan.

The lesson stands: the telescope did not make the photograph. The ephemeris did.

A series with one planet left

The Jupiter image joins an ongoing project Smadi calls "ISS Meets." He has already paired the orbital lab with Venus, Saturn, and Mars. The Venus result may be singular. "As far as I'm aware, I have the only known ISS-Venus transits ever recorded," he says.

One target remains. Setting aside the distant Uranus and Neptune, Mercury is the only planet in the Solar System Smadi has not yet captured alongside the station. Mercury hugs the Sun in the sky, so the geometry will be harder still. More of his work appears on Instagram and Reddit, and the "ISS Meets" series now stands one reluctant planet short of a full set.