Don Pettit, the oldest active astronaut in NASA, returned to earth on April 20, the day he was 70 years old. This concluded his fourth trip to space – 220 days occupied at the international space station.
Like other crew members of the space station, Mr. Pettit conducted experiments, spoke with the students and did the exercise for hours to maintain his health and avoid the loss of bone density. But the most catchy work he accomplished in orbit was his photograph.
Most people on earth will never have the chance to go to space. “I could try to give them an overview of my imagery,” said Pettit at a press conference a few weeks after his return.
Mr. Pettit noted that hard photographers always wanted to have a camera in hand. “I could look out the window and enjoy the view,” he said. “But when I look out the window, I just appreciate the view, it’s like: ‘Oh, Wow, a meteor. Oh, wow. Look at that. Dude, there is a flash there. What is this? And “Oh, look at that, a volcano that is triggered”. Is it like, “ok, where is my camera?” “”
Sometimes he installed five cameras at the same time in the Cupola module of the space station, where seven windows offer panoramic views of space and earth.
Spatial photography often resembles night photography. The stars are dark and exhibitions for seconds or minutes are necessary to bring together enough photons. But in orbit, nothing is seated. The Zoomance space station around the earth about five miles per second, and the earth also turns.
Sometimes Mr. Pettit took advantage of the movement for artistic beauty – lower lights to blur in bright lines, while the stars above traced the arcs in the sky.
“I think it’s a mixture of science and art,” wrote Mr. Pettit on X. “There are so many techno-geek stuff, or you can just sit down and think” like cool “.”
Other times, the camera has been mounted on an “orbital sidereal tracker” – a homemade device that Mr. Pettit spoke of the earth which would swivel slowly to counter the movement of the space station so that the lens has remained pointed at a particular place in the sky.
The tracker allowed an exhibition of 10 seconds to capture a crystalline image of the milky path above a cloudy peaceful ocean just before sunrise. Blue glow emerges from the diffusion of sunlight off the nitrogen in the earth’s atmosphere.
The Sidereal tracker also allowed the image below, taken through the window of a Dragon Crew Dragon spaceship moored SpaceX.
The two dwarf galaxies in the image are the big and small magellanic clouds. On the cosmic scale, they are among the neighbors closest to our milky galaxy.
In April, Mr. Pettit recorded this video of the ethereal rhythmic pulses of the aurora – the brilliant light emitted when molecules in the atmosphere are bombed by high -energy particles of the sun.
Sometimes the colorful lights were carried out by human activities, not cosmic phenomena. The green streaks on this image are almost the same color as the dawn, but these are the lights used by the fishing boats off Thailand to attract calmar.
With his camera pointing to the ground, Mr. Pettit recorded lightning in the upper atmosphere above the Amazonian basin in South America. For the video, the weather was stretched in length at 33 seconds from around 6 seconds, revealing more structure in the flashes.
The Betsiboka river in Madagascar reminded Mr. Petit the blood vessels of the eye.
Metropolitan areas light up at night, just like forest fires.
Mr. Petit also took advantage of the opportunities to capture the aisles and outings of the space space for the earth – including a test launch of a SpaceX Starship rocket in Texas last November …
… And the mooring of a Dragon Spacex spacecraft carrying a cargo to the space station in December.
During his time on leave, Mr. Pettit also concocted fun scientific experiences. One showed electrically charged water droplets dancing around a teflon knitting needle. “I want to do things in the space you can only do in space,” he said. “And I will worry about catching up with television programs and things like that after my return.”
In another experience, he injected food color into a water sphere, creating a globule that somewhat looked like the planet Jupiter, or a very nice marble.
Mr. Pettit also dissolved an antacid tablet in a water sphere. Without gravity to raise the bubbles and easily escape from water, the patterns of pop, plant, petizz, petizz are completely different in space.
He also frozen with thin slices of water ice at less than 140 degrees Fahrenheit. “What would you do with such a freezer in space?” He wrote on X. “I decided to grow thin slices of water ice without reason that I am in space and I can.”
The photograph of ice pads through polarizing filters has revealed complex crystal patterns.
Mr. Pettit is the oldest astronaut in NASA, but he is not the oldest person to go to orbit. It was John Glenn, who was the first American astronaut to go around the earth in 1962, then stole in 1998 on the discovery of the space shuttle at the age of 77.
Mr. Pettit is not even the oldest person to spend time at the international space station. A private astronaut, Larry Connor, was 72 years old when spent two weeks there in 2022 as part of a mission operated by Axiom Space in Houston.
“I am only 70 years old, so I still have a few good years left,” said Mr. Pettit at the press conference. “I could see another flight or two before I was ready to hang up my rocket nozzles.”
