If you’ve ever flown in an airliner at 30,000 feet on a clear day, the view from nearly six miles up is probably something you’ll never forget. Imagine, then, looking down from 245 miles in orbit aboard the International Space Station, (ISS), where the view is always clear and the earth slowly turns beneath you.
This week, two videos taken from the ISS not only give us a tiny tease of what that must be like, but do so as spectacular events play out below.
The first video shows shows an unusual aurora shimmering above the earth, filmed as the ISS crossed the southern Indian Ocean on September 17. The video compresses 23 minutes into 35 seconds.
Although aurora are most often seen near the poles, this instance appeared at lower latitudes due to a geomagnetic storm – an injection of energy into Earth’s magnetosphere caused by a solar, coronal mass ejection that erupted on September 14.
Rated a 6 on a scale of 0 to 9, this moderate storm delivered Earth only a glancing blow.
The second video is a time-lapse composite of more than 600 frames taken as the ISS orbited Earth at night and a lightning storm raged over the Pacific Ocean.
The movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico are also visible, along with the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula. El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon.
The thin yellow line on the horizon is the earth’s ionosphere and beyond that, the stars.
