New Year's Eve

The New Year has started offering a great gift to those who, beside recognizing its ability to record human experience, are also "sensible" to the scientific use of photography. The first solar eclipse of the year (there will be three more, according to calculations) has been a benefit for Europe, north Africa and middle-East. I was very unlucky to find a dark cloudy sky, while I was at my parents' in Rome but I discovered there has been someone who moved quite far from home in order to observe what he mostly wanted (click on the image to get a larger view).

Photograph, (C) Thierry Legault

Astro-photographer Thierry Legault traveled from France to the Sultanate of Oman to take special pictures of the solar event. As he explains, he went to Oman as he calculated he would have had the best chances to capture the ISS floating on its orbit through the solar disk when the eclipse was occurring.

Strange but true: France has given birth to H.C.Bresson, who would have certainly had something to say about all this maths for capturing a decisive moment.