In his final weeks aboard the space station after six months in orbit, NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick has shared a gorgeous time-lapse of Earth.
It shows a large part of Asia as the International Space Station (ISS) passed over it at night at an altitude of about 250 miles. The footage, which you can watch below, shows numerous flashes of lightning over a wide area, bright clusters of city lights, and colored lights from fishing boats, which Dominick describes as “one of my favorite things to see at night from the ISS.” But it also shows a bright red light, the source of which Dominick is unsure about.
Timelapse traveling Northeast over Southeast Asia.
In order of appearance:
* So many lightning strikes
* Colored lights from fishing boats – one of my favorite things to see at night from the ISS
* Juxtaposition of city lights on the Korean Peninsula
* Red lights North of… pic.twitter.com/vN5VnCKirb
— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) September 14, 2024
While some commenters suggested the red light could be volcanic activity, others said it may be coming from commercial squid fishing boats that use bright red lights to attract the creatures.
“Those red lights are from an immense fishing fleet east of Hokkaido,” wrote someone else in a post responding to Dominick’s time-lapse. “It shows up in various patterns on night views from the Suomi NPP satellite.”
Dominick has spent some of his six months aboard the space station sharing stunning imagery of not only Earth and beyond, but also of the interior of the orbital outpost itself. But with SpaceX’s Crew-9 arriving at the ISS next month, Dominick and his three fellow Crew-8 members will be returning to Earth in October.
While many will miss marveling at Dominick’s amazing photos and videos, Don Pettit, who arrived at the station just recently, also has a reputation for producing impressive visual content, so space fans are looking forward to seeing what the veteran astronaut shares in the coming months. In fact, just the other day, Pettit captured this remarkable shot of SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn spacecraft entering Earth’s atmosphere at high speed after a historic five-day mission.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
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A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.