As the moon sneaked in front of the sun during Monday’s total solar eclipse, a NASA photographer captured a once-in-a-lifetime sight.

Joel Kowsky, one of the space agency’s photo editors, was in Banner, Wyoming, to watch the solar eclipse when he photographed the International Space Station zooming in front of a crescent-shaped sun.

Below is a video Kowsky recorded using a high-speed camera that recorded 1,500 frames a second. He also photographed the ISS with a standard camera (above composite image).

You can see the space station as a small “H” that moves across the field of view.

Such high-speed recording is necessary because the ISS orbits Earth from 250 miles up and moves at a speed of 17,500 mph.

It may look small, but the space station is enormous: It weighs some 450 tons, or more than twice the heft of an adult blue whale, and spans roughly the area of a football field.

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Foto: The International Space Station (ISS). source NASA

To capture such a fast-moving object from the right angle requires months or years of planning – and a lot of luck.