The sun is blank--no sunspots. That makes it a perfect backdrop for passing spaceships:

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© Levin Dieterle
Amateur astronomer Levin Dieterle photographed the transit on August 15th from Hofstetten, Germany. "The ISS crossed the entire sun in only 0.64 seconds," he says. He captured the split-second event using a solar-filtered telescope and a Canon 40D digital camera.

The station's silhouette traces solar arrays, science labs, living quarters and a docked Russian supply ship. Next year, the outline will expand to include a cosmic ray telescope called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. From its perch atop the station's massive backbone, or "truss," the telescope will scan the heavens for antimatter galaxies, strangelets, dark matter and other exotic phenomena only detectable from Earth orbit.