Case in point: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui posted this one of the more unusual views from the International Space Station in recent months, pointing out that this scene was seen only when the orbiting platform front-to-back wasn’t in the forward position as they usually are moving.
The photograph is notable in several aspects because it packs multiple aspects of spaceflight into a single image. The solar equipment on one side of the station armouries in the foreground just streys into darkness, Earth’s thin atmosphere below is lit in deep blue hues, and in the background, recognizable deep space features are commonly mentioned in reference to astronaut photos but not discussed here. Rather than separate the planet, the spacecraft or the stars, the image has become one with all three.
This point of view is quite unique from low Earth orbit. The International Space Station operates at approximately 400 kilometers above the Earth, completing an orbit every 90 minutes or so, meaning that the crew regularly moves between day and night on Earth, and has plenty of chances to see auroras from space. The Earth-observation archive at NASA has astirbunker auroral curtains for several years, on North America, on Europe, on the Indian Ocean, on the Southern Ocean for each of these regions, either emphasis is put on the lights themselves, or on the icons below. YUI’s frame is very layered, with station structures, atmosphere, an aurora and stars all vying for attention yet none overwhelming each other. It makes the image look more like a map than a post-card of the location of the ISS: between a glowing planet and a crowded sky.
The glory of the Aurora isn’t limited to that. From space, auroras are seen at a scale which can be hard to appreciate from the ground. They occur in the rings around Earth’s poles, as part of the larger expanse of auroral ovals; when seen from above these arcs look like gleaming structures enveloping Earth. Thus, the red and green hues of the image, as seen in Yui, reflect the previously observed colors in the atmosphere: red lower bands and green emissions above; where Yui’s angles and colors are created, there are so many energetic particles that they interact with oxygen at different levels in the atmosphere.
This is why, in fact, sometimes astronauts refer to the auroras as an event bigger than the weather. The lights from orbit may look like a wall, a fog bank, a bow wave or a halo.g］Repeated instances of workers being careless in flying near, over and at times into them in the region of the Indian Ocean and waters to the south of Australia, particularly where southern aurora passes were observed are found in archived station images.
Yui’s is and image is also one of belown tranquility cosmic elements. In the same field, he spotted Alpha Centauri, the dark Coalsack Nebula, the Southern Cross and Eta Carinae. What matters is that type of alignment otherwise the beautiful earth image is merely an earth picture. We are no longer observing through a window looking out on a planet, we are moving through a walkway where the nearest cosmic objects in the Earth’s atmosphere, cosmic objects near the Sun and the deepest, farthest, can all be viewed simultaneously.
The image has a further meaning for those who are interested in aerospace and mechanical systems. It demonstrates how the orientation of the vehicle influences the perception of perception itself. An attitude adjustment can expose a line of sight that isn’t possible during normal attitudes and show the importance of engineering considerations in what can be seen and captured by cameras in the ISS. In this way, it’s not only beautiful, it is also memorable. It will be a wonderful memory because it will fleetingly evoke the ISS as a machine and as an observatory, elevated above a glowing living environment.