Good backlight. : )
You would have to do your homework to know exactly when to shoot.
Oh yes, and know your required position too!. The transits are only a few seconds long, and the ground track of the transit is only a few tens of miles wide.
Yes and he did it with a Canon 5D MKII and www.calsky.com worked out the when and where.
Transit duration: 0.8s. Transit bandwidth on Earth: 5.6 km. Altitude: 600 km. Speed: 7 km/s (25000 km/h). Length of Atlantis : 35m, length of Hubble : 13m.
Transit forecast (place, time...) calculated by www.calsky.com.
Takahashi TOA-130 refractor (diameter 130mm, final focal 2200mm), Baader solar prism and Canon 5D mark II. Exposure of 1/8000s at 100 ISO, extracted from a series of 16 images (4 images/s) started 2s before the predicted time.
Excellent job of calculating the trajectory and timing of the shuttle's transit. NASA keeps a page where you can enter your position and find out when evening and morning fly-overs with possible sighting opportunities will occur. Here's that link.
NASA- Sighting Ops.
It's pretty cool to actually see it moving across the sky at night. It's similar to seeing an aircraft or bright moving star, but because the craft is in sunlight, the light is very steady, not blinking.
