NASA astronaut takes beautiful images of star trails from the ISS
Art, science and space came together for an alien postcard with star trails captured from the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s astrophotography skills were on full display in a new image shared with X on November 7. The long exposure shot shows Earth with circular star trails swirling through space.
Besides the star trails in the top half, there’s a lot going on in the image. The streak lights on Earth come from cities. Aurora light glows green. Lightning flashes appear as points of light above the earth. A small part of the ISS is visible at the top of the frame.
“I’ve never been able to capture this before,” Pettit tweeted, saying new fast wide-angle lenses “make observations possible that weren’t possible before.”
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Pettit set his camera to a 30-minute snapshot during orbital night. The sunset is on the left and the sunrise on the right. The ISS witnesses sixteen sunrises and sunsets every day as it moves along its orbit above the planet.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit has a history of making star trails from the ISS. He called this 2012 long exposure shot “Lightning Bugs.”
Pettit shared technical details with other photography enthusiasts. He used a Nikon Z9 camera with an Arri/Zeiss lens. He took the image into Photoshop and adjusted the levels, contrast and color, and removed blemishes.
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The computer that Pettit used for photo processing on the ISS is not the most recent model.
“With our current 8 year old laptops I can’t do dark frame subtraction followed by robust noise reduction operations (would take about 30 hours for a single composition, where cosmic rays would probably require a restart), so clean, finished photos will have to wait until I return to Earth,” Pettit said. Despite these limitations, Pettit proved to be a knockout image.
Pettit has been on the ISS since mid-September and is expected to stay for six months. He is a space veteran known for his photography work. He recently captured a beautiful aurora image with swirling green lights from the ISS. The star trail image is just the beginning of the astronaut’s long-exposure experiments with his new photography equipment.
Pettit said: “Stay tuned for more of this.”
