Too late to edit my comment but amateur astronomer was a poor label for the guy who took the picture. He is the best astrophotographer for satellites that I've seen. Here is his personal website where he has his collection:
There are two groups of people who take pictures of satellites:
1. Amateur astronomers like this guy.
2. Nation states who take clandestine photos of other nation's spy satellites. These pictures are better, but you haven't seen them.
For everything else, there's some guy working in the lab who's like, "oh, you want a picture of our satellite? Of course, there's like 40 of them on our press site. Do you need more? I can ask around and see if anyone's taken selfies from interesting angles." So there's no open institutional force behind it. So the only reasonable outcome of natural market forces is that amateur astronomers create the best pictures of satellites in orbit.
Amateur astronomer isn't a slur either, if that was your point. Take a look at the galleries on cloudnights, a lot of it wouldn't look out of place on NASA/ESA homepages.
Astronomers usually aren't tracking satellites, so if one shows up in an image it's only as a streak. You need to be moving the camera to track the object to get a reasonably clear image (or very short exposure times, which are relatively uncommon in astronomy).
Agree with everything you said. I just meant he has a Wikipedia page where he's listed as an astronomer and professional photographer. I'm not sure where the line is drawn between amateur and professional in his case. I'm not sure if he works professionally as an astronomer as well, although he seems to be more of a space journalist.
That is really impressive...though I don't quite understand why the illustration looks so different; even though there's likely a lot of bloom in the photo, the parts don't seem to match up with the illustration based on the general brightness values.
The illustration shows the payload bay doors open.
In the photo perhaps they are either closed, or open with something hanging out of the payload bay, or some other configuration, making the brightness the way it is???
The doors are almost certainly open. Just like shuttle, there are no external radiators on this plane. They are relatively delicate structures that wouldn't survive reentry.
So they have to be inside the doors somewhere. Shuttle had to open its doors within a fixed time, else abort and return, and keep them open while on orbit. No doubt this spaceplane follows a similar profile.
(Also, solar panels. Shuttle didn't use them but if this thing is spending years in space it is probably using solar panels too. They would be mounted at 90* to the radiators, creating a T-shaped structure with different albedos that should be identifiable in even a blurry picture.)
Here is an impressive photograph that an amateur astronomer took in June/July of this year.