Astronauts are many issues. They’re usually scientists, engineers, or pilots. And within the case of NASA astronaut Don Pettit, he is additionally an astrophotographer.
Pettit is at the moment on his third keep on the Worldwide Area Station (ISS), and he is persevering with his long-running custom of taking out-of-this-world images (pun supposed). His newest shot, a picture of the celebrities and several other galaxies, showcases not solely his visible prowess, but additionally his engineering expertise — he used a self-designed device to perform this picture.
At first look, the picture would possibly appear like a reasonably typical shot from the ISS: You see stars and the curvature of Earth, with a definite orange glow above our planet’s floor. However there’s one thing unusual concerning the picture: The floor of Earth is blurred, but lots of if not hundreds of stars are in good focus.
Underneath regular circumstances, long-exposure images comparable to this could present the celebrities as streaks throughout the sky, for the reason that ISS is transferring at about 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 km per hour).
However therein lies Pettit’s genius. He is introduced with him to area a selfmade star tracker, a tool that rotates a digital camera to compensate for the ISS’s motion. It is a variation on a device utilized by astrophotographers on Earth to take lengthy exposures of the celebrities because the planet rotates beneath the night time sky, compensating for that rotation to maintain the celebrities from turning into streaks within the picture.
“This tracker rotates at 90 min [sic] interval to match the pitch fee of ISS. With out this tracker, you can’t take picture longer than 1/2 sec [sic] with out star blur as a result of fee of orbital movement,” wrote Pettit on Reddit.
The result’s an unbelievably clear picture of the night time sky, exhibiting vastly extra stars than is feasible with a shorter publicity. (Longer exposures let in additional gentle, or on this case, fainter stars.)
In area, you’ll be able to see stars!I flew a home-made monitoring gadget that enables time exposures required to {photograph} star fields.Keep tuned for extra images like this. pic.twitter.com/OO57o4oU8lDecember 5, 2024
This is not the primary time Pettit demonstrated his engineering expertise on the ISS. In 2008, he devised the zero-G espresso cup, which grew to become the primary patented invention in area.
The astronaut was uninterested in sipping his tea and low out of pouches via straws, form of like a Capri Solar — in microgravity, you’ll be able to’t tip a cup to get the liquid out, and when you shake it, the liquid will slosh out. However Pettit common an open-container cup from a chunk of plastic that makes use of floor stress to perform akin to a cup on Earth.
“It provides again the dimension of what it’s prefer to be a human being in a civilized approach,” he mentioned in a YouTube video.
