THE JOLLY BUCCANEERS

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) see the world at night on every orbit —that’s 16 times each crew day.

An astronaut took this broad, short-lens photograph of Earth’s night lights while looking out over the remote reaches of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean.

ISS was passing over the island nation of Kiribati at the time, about 2600 kilometers (1,600 miles) south of Hawaii.

Knowing the exact time and the location of the ISS, scientists were able to match the star field in the photo to charts describing which stars should have been visible at that moment.

They identified the pattern of stars in the photo as our Milky Way galaxy (looking toward its center). The dark patches are dense dust clouds in an inner spiral arm of our galaxy; such clouds can block our view of stars toward the center.

TO BE CONTINUED ON

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=88026&src=eoa-iotd

This entry was posted on May 17, 2016 at 11:47 pm and is filed under 2016, astronomy with tags astronauts, ISS, Milky Way, NASA, Space, Stargazing from the ISS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.