Stars, Galaxies & Earth Airglow | International Space Station

Stars, Galaxies & Earth Airglow | International Space Station

Expedition 72 flight engineer and NASA astronaut Don Pettit has captured spectacular views of a "starry night from an orbital palette". In this series of images, you can see the Earth's vibrant airglow, the Milky Way, and two neighboring galaxies—the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) visible in the Earth's southern hemisphere.

Over 160,000 light-years away, the Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that looms large in the southern nighttime sky at twenty times the apparent diameter of the full Moon.

The Small Magellanic Cloud is an irregular dwarf galaxy nearly 200,000 light-years way that orbits our own Milky Way spiral galaxy.

Airglow occurs when atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, excited by sunlight, emit light to shed their excess energy. Or, it can happen when atoms and molecules that have been ionized by sunlight collide with and capture a free electron. In both cases, they eject a particle of light—called a photon—in order to relax again. The phenomenon is similar to auroras, but where auroras are driven by high-energy particles originating from the solar wind, airglow is energized by ordinary, day-to-day solar radiation.

Unlike auroras, which are episodic and fleeting, airglow constantly shines throughout Earth’s atmosphere, and the result is a tenuous bubble of light that closely encases our entire planet. (Auroras, on the other hand, are usually constrained to Earth’s poles.) Just a tenth as bright as all the stars in the night sky, airglow is far more subdued than auroras, too dim to observe easily except in orbit or on the ground with clear, dark skies and a sensitive camera. However, it is a marker nevertheless of the dynamic region where Earth meets space . . .

Expedition 72 Updates:

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/

Expedition 72 Crew
Station Commander: Suni Williams
Roscosmos (Russia) Flight Engineers: Alexey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner, Aleksandr Gorbunov
NASA Flight Engineers: Butch Wilmore, Don Pettit, Nick Hague

An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada.

Image Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)/D.Pettit
Release Dates: Jan. 29-Feb. 15, 2025

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