Auroras, stars and a fleeting meteorite are captured in a new video from the International Space Station.
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, commander of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission, has shared a new timelapse of photographs taken from Earth just before dawn. This middle-of-the-night view includes auroras dancing in Earth’s atmosphere, twinkling stars, passing satellites, and a brief sequence of meteors.
The time-lapse taken from inside the orbiting laboratory’s Cupola module, with the Canadarm2 rover seen in the close-up of the video. Dominick shared the new time-lapse in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on July 21.
Related: Meet the SpaceX Crew-8 astronauts launching to the ISS
“If you look closely, halfway through, you can see a meteor towards Earth,” Dominick wrote in the post.
However, the most visual thing in the timelapse are the green and violet auroras that illuminate the night sky. The northern lights, known as the northern lights or aurora australis, are caused by charged debris emitted by the sun, also known as the solar wind. , which collide and excite oxygen and nitrogen atoms in Earth’s atmosphere, creating soft, bright spectacles.
It was a year of intense auroras due to solar maximum, which occurs when the sun reaches its maximum solar activity in its 11-year cycle. As a result, Earth is bombarded by even more solar debris that produces more common nighttime auroras.
Dominick arrived at the space station on March 3, 2024, and serves as a flight engineer aboard the orbiting laboratory for a planned six-month mission. In addition to assigned duties, which include science experiments and maintaining the area station, Dominick enjoys taking pictures from the area.
In some other article, Dominick explained how he and his teammates took an exclusive photograph of the Dragon capsule, called Endeavour, that carried the Crew-8 astronauts to the space station. The team installed a camera in the cockpit window of Boeing’s Starliner. in Dragon to capture portraits of each team member. The perfectly timed photo, which Dominick also shared on X (officially Twitter), takes advantage of moonlight to illuminate Dragon, with stars and parts of the Milky Way captured in the background.
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Samantha Mathewson joined Space. com as an intern in the summer of 2016. She earned a bachelor’s degree. in Journalism and Environmental Sciences from the University of New Haven in Connecticut. Previously, her paintings were published in Nature World News. When she is not writing or reading about science, Samantha enjoys traveling to new places and taking photographs. You can follow her on Twitter. @Sam_Ashley13.
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