• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

What Does A Sunset Look Like From Space?

June 28, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Unless someone happens to have had an unusually extreme early bedtime for the entirety of their life, we’ve all seen plenty of sunsets in our time. Given the wealth of them that end up on Instagram stories, they look pretty great too – but have you ever wondered what they look like from space?

Advertisement

It’s not like most of us can pop up there and find out (although you never know) but thankfully, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) like to snap a few pictures whilst they’re there, giving us a brand-new perspective on a regular part of day-to-day life on the planet.

Advertisement

One of the most spectacular images of a sunset from space was captured by European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut and geophysicist Alexander Gerst, during his second stint on the ISS as part of the Horizons mission.

A photograph taken above the Earth of a sunset on the land below

Sunset from space is as dreamy as it comes.

In the image, taken on October 18, 2018, clouds in Earth’s atmosphere can be seen illuminated in that classic sunset pink-ish orange, though the dark night sky is also visible creeping up close behind them.

But that’s not the only view possible – an image snapped by a member of NASA’s Expedition 49 crew back in 2016 also shows a fiery perspective of the layers of Earth’s atmosphere during sunset over South Atlantic.

sideways view of a sunset taken by crew on the international space station

Aboard the ISS, sunset can also be viewed sideways.

Image credit: ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center

The bright orange-red line is within the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere and home to clouds, smoke, and dust particles. It’s the latter two that give sunsets their distinctive color, which explains why the red seen in this image is quite so vivid.

Advertisement

Though the ISS was halfway between South America and South Africa at the time, from the station’s altitude astronauts are able to see over 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) to the horizon. Easy enough, then, to capture the influence of Patagonian Desert dust, which is blown out towards the ocean by strong winds.

Since the ISS orbits the planet once every 90 minutes, that means those onboard can witness 16 such striking sunsets a day – and the same goes for sunrises, though most of the time they’re missed by astronauts because of sleep or work.

Thankfully, Gerst’s photography steps up to the plate once again to show what others can’t see. During the Horizons mission, the astronaut captured a timelapse of a sunrise, with two photos taken every second.

The result is somewhat reminiscent of an eclipse at first (at least, the view we have of one on Earth), with a faint line of light growing across the screen until a big burst of light (aka the Sun) comes into view and begins to light up the land below.

Advertisement

And there you have it, now you know what a sunset and sunrise look like from space. Everybody say “thank you astronauts!”

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. China vehicle sales slid 18% in August – industry body
  2. Fed’s Powell: Reopening economic bottlenecks could be “more enduring”
  3. The World’s Oldest Bottle Of Wine Might Actually Be Safe To Drink
  4. How Coffee Could Protect Against Alzheimer’s: Espresso Found To Inhibit Tau Proteins

Source Link: What Does A Sunset Look Like From Space?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version