A stunning new time-lapse video shows off the movements of both the stars and our home planet as seen from the International Space Station.
While other videos have mostly focused on the nighttime Earth rolling by, photographer Alex Rivest wanted to highlight something new. He enhanced publicly available data from NASA’s Johnson Space Center to focus each shot on the background moving stars. The result is enough to make any backyard stargazer incredibly jealous.
“As someone who tries to get away from light pollution to look up and get lost under the stars (I always take star time-lapse movies whenever I get away from the city lights), I am fascinated by what the stars must look like from space,” Rivest wrote in an email to Wired Science. “This particular track, to me, made it feel like one was taking a stroll in low earth orbit, watching the stars.”
With amazing shots of shifting green auroras, the slowly rising Milky Way, or the sun peeking over the Earth’s limb, the video is a treat. Of course, Earth is also impossible to miss in most of the clips. Nighttime lights shine brightly throughout Europe and North America while lightning-tinged thunderstorms brew over Africa.
The ISS even makes some special guest appearances in the video, which shows the station’s solar panels moving in an out of “Night Glider mode” in order to reduce drag from the tenuous atmosphere they encounter high above the Earth.
Since it was uploaded on March 13, the video has garnered a huge response, with thousands of viewers from over 150 countries. “To me, this shows how we are all drawn to these amazing images and the idea of exploring the solar system,” Rivest wrote. “Explorers need to keep sharing experiences and inspiring each other.”
Music: “Truck out There” by London PM.
First sequence star-trails processed using StarStaX
Other time-lapse clips and images courtesy of The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. The Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.