Becoming an astronaut was like you’re walking in the clouds when you first found out that

you’ve been selected. My first spaceflight was on the Space Shuttle Endeavor, STS 113.

[Launch control narration]

Looking at Earth from space is amazingly beautiful. It’s a perspective where you can see things

on a scale of a half a continent.

Apart from everything else an astronaut does while in orbit, photography is actually part

of our job.

“I’m gonna to set up to do atmospheric airglow images.”

We take pictures of Earth and the surroundings of Earth; the upper atmosphere.

“And we gotta manually do the F-Stop. We gotta manually do the focus. And now… we

gotta look through this thing…”

These pictures in themselves represent a scientific data set recorded over now for fourteen years.

Astronaut imagery of Earth is an example of learning what you need to take pictures of

and how to take the pictures.

Space is a place where your normal intuition does not apply. Things don’t work the way

they do down here on Earth. You are moving at eight kilometers a second… that’s fast!

And so you have to be able to smooth a camera at the same rate of orbital motion while you’re

taking pictures to actually get the sharpest imagery.

My favorite subject is the Earth at night. Aurora is just amazingly beautiful. It’s

this glowing upper part of the atmosphere that crawls around like amoebas in the sky.

And then cities at night, the way human beings sprinkle their light bulbs around, it’s

a fascinating statement on how we as human beings define our urban areas.

In terms of the star trail pictures, the stars are moving because of the pitch axis of the

station. The cities move by because of your orbital motion and Earth’s rotation. There’s

all kinds of other delightful physics and natural phenomenon that you can see in these

pictures, and we can tickle our imagination and enrich our minds from this gain in knowledge.

When you explore a frontier, the people who explore bring back images, and bring back

stories about what these frontiers are like. I feel an obligation to share this experience,

so that everybody else can at least participate through the eyes of the people who do go into

the frontiers.

I’m Don Pettit. I’m a photographer and an astronaut.