Cool sun image captured by total luck

Astrophotography is often a matter of effort and planning - you have to set up and maintain your gear, pick your targets based on weather and moon conditions, set up your sequence, process the captured image, etc. Sometimes you have to travel to specific locations to get the shot you want (landscape photography, eclipses, transits). Other times, you just walk into a cool shot.

I like to take solar images whenever I’ve got my astrophotography gear out after a night of imaging - my set up is nice and easy. I pop on my solar filter and swap out the narrowband or broadband filter in the drawer for a blank. My capture process involves grabbing 2000 frames of video and then stacking the best X% of those into a single image and then processing that image. I don’t have a planetary camera, so my framerate when I narrow my Region of Interest down to the sun is around 20-23 frames per second. It takes roughly 90 seconds to capture the solar image I need. I’ll often watch the sun before and after that, but if anything happens, I won’t have captured it.

This particular day was no different. I waited until the sun got up a bit in the sky and then hit the button to capture video. As I was watching, I saw a couple indistinct satellites drift through and then suddenly a plane passed directly through the center of the sun. I am outside of Boston, so plane traffic in my deep sky images is quite common. But this was 90 total seconds! And it went right cleanly through the middle! Super cool and total luck!

After some research, it appears the plane I photographed was American Airlines flight 2527 en route from Boston to Dallas-Fort Worth. Those lucky passengers waited nearly 2 hours as their flight was delayed to perfectly set up this image for me: https://www.flightradar24.com/2024-07-19/11:53/20x/AAL2527/363936e4.

Here’s my fully processed solar image sans plane:

Here’s the plane (single frames are noisy and fuzzy):

Here’s a slow motion GIF of the transit: