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Orbiting 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) get an unparalleled view of space above the planet’s horizon.Hopeful to take advantage of the space station’s sky window, NASA astronaut Don Pettit prepared for his ISS mission by packing a tracking device. , which helped him take long pictures of the surrounding stars and galaxies radiation images.
Not recently note: On X, Pettit shared a photo he took from the window of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft attached to the ISS. The photo shows a sky field full of stars and two galaxies from the Milky Way. allowing for the time exposure required to photograph the star fields,” Pettit wrote on X. “Stay tuned for more photos like this.”
Pettit’s homemade star finder, a motorized gimbal mounted between the camera and tripod to counteract the motion of the stars, is quite impressive, allowing us to see a clear view of the stars from low Earth orbit instead of the usually blurry photos taken from the ISS.
You can see stars in space.
I was flying a home tracking device that allows time exposures to photograph the star fields.
Stay tuned for more photos like this! pic.twitter.com/OO57o4oU8l— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) December 5, 2024
The two galactic figures belong to the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, according to LiveScience. They are both of the Milky Way’s closest neighbors and can be seen in the night sky from the southern hemisphere.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy about 160,000 light-years away and contains about 30 billion stars. Its smaller counterpart, the Small Magellanic Cloud, is a dwarf galaxy with about 3 billion stars About 210,000 light years from Earth, both galaxies are thought to act as galactic moons that orbit our Milky Way galaxy as it travels through space.
Petit’s side-by-side image of two galaxies makes space visible.This isn’t Astronauts’ first attempt to share views of the ISS. Pettit recorded what he called “space volcanoes”. outside the floating space station, which were actually Starlink satellites reflecting sunlight.
The NASA astronaut launched to the ISS in September aboard a Russian Soyuz crew capsule as part of the Expedition 72 mission. At age 69, Pettit is NASA’s oldest active astronaut, having logged more than 370 days in space and more than 13 hours of spacewalks. time. NASA. Having spent all that time in space, an astronaut is still curious about the universe around him, and he’s taking us along for the ride.
