Solar powered
Solar powered: Amateur astronomer snaps space shuttle and telescope speeding across the sun
At first glance it appears like a giant tennis ball with a speck of dirt.
But this extraordinary image, taken by an amateur astronomer, shows the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Telescope passing in front of the sun.
It is the first time they have been photographed together making a 'solar transit' and came several minutes before Atlantis made contact with the telescope and attached to it.
The Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope are seen in silhouette (lower left hand corner). The sun appears ghostly because in order for the picture to be taken a prism attached to the camera filtered out most of the sunlight
The shuttle has been sent up to do repairs on the Hubble for the fifth and final time. Astronauts on board are replacing the Wide Field Camera 2 and NASA hopes to get another five to 10 years of dazzling views of the cosmos from Hubble as a result of the upgrades.
NASA are launching the James Webb Space Telescope in 2014, which will replace Hubble once it becomes defunct.
The stunning images were taken by Thierry Legault, an engineer famed for taking pictures of space from his back garden in Paris.
These images, however, were taken from Florida, 60 miles south of the Kennedy Space Centre from where the Space Shuttle blasted off on Tuesday.
'I brought the equipment from France with me,' he told the Mail Online.
'All calculations had been made by the specialized site www.calsky.com so that I knew weeks before when the transit would be visible from Florida.
'Once there it only took a few minutes to install the telescope on a big video tripod.'
In this close up of the above image, the Space Shuttle can be seen just above the Hubble Space Telescope
In this image only the silhouette of the Space Shuttle can be seen. It launched from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday and was pictured passing across the Sun on Wednesday
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