This is a beautiful story. Sebastian Voltmer and Matthias Maurer are from the German town of Sankt Wendel. They met in person three years ago. On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, the former captured a photo of the latter shortly after sunset, as he was servicing the International Space Station during a spacewalk. This is likely the first case ever of someone from Earth capturing an astronaut in space (so far, no contradictory reaction has emerged).
In the photo, Maurer occupies only a few pixels, so initially Voltmer only identified him. It was only when Philip Smith, another amateur ISS enthusiast, recognized the second astronaut as American Raja Chari. Verification was aided by an eight-hour annotated recording of the spacewalk published by NASA.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime photo,” comments Voltmer. Everything came together – he had the necessary equipment, programmed it correctly, knew about the spacewalk, and when the ISS was passing over Germany, the visibility was excellent.”
