Astronaut Don Pettit has captured yet another fascinating photo from space, showing a long exposure of a rocket launch hidden among the stars.
The lines in the picture are very attractive. At first glance, it looks like a standard star trail taken from the International Space Station (ISS), but look a little closer and you’ll see faint lines extending in a different direction.
That faint line is Blue Origin’s heavy-lift rocket, the New Glenn rocket. The 320-foot (98-meter) spacecraft departed from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida last Thursday.
“New Glenn rocket launch photographed from the ISS on January 16,” Pettit wrote in X. “This shows the New Glenn upper stage in its coastal phase after booster separation.”
Pettit said the photo was a four-minute exposure, and New Glenn appears as a faint streak moving from the lower right to the upper left as it crosses the brighter vertical star trail.
“This was not an easy photo,” he added. “The ISS was over Oklahoma at the beginning of the exposure and over the central Gulf of Mexico at the end of the exposure.”
Perched on the cupola (a small dome-shaped module on the ISS that provides a panoramic view of Earth and space), Pettit set up three cameras with wide-angle lenses and said, “I hope one can capture orbits beyond the atmosphere. I thought about it.”
astronaut photographer
At 69 years old, Pettit is currently NASA’s oldest active astronaut and the second-oldest person to have visited space. Since being launched into orbit for the fourth time in September, the veteran has taken many stunning photos, including one remarkable photo of the Milky Way, Starlink satellites, and false dawn on January 14th. “It’s probably the best photo ever taken from the ISS,” said astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy.
Yesterday, Pettit demonstrated how to change a camera lens in space. Of course, changing lenses in zero gravity is very convenient for photographers because they don’t have to worry about dropping their precious glass.
“So how often do you accidentally drop your lens while returning to Earth, hoping it will float away?” one person joked.
Image credit: NASA/Photo by Don Pettit
