Barring fireworks on the space station, NASA astronauts improvised with camera flashes to celebrate Independence Day.
International Space Station Astronaut (ISS) Matthew Dominick played with “light painting” — a long exposure in a dark room that illuminates a subject with a light source — during the Expedition 71 break to celebrate the Fourth of July.
“No fireworks on ISS so we used camera flashes instead. Experimented with ‘light painting’ today,” Dominick wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Dominick has already been practicing time lapses in the orbital complex in between his regular duties, capturing stunning images of Earth and the space station in motion. But for the US party, the NASA astronaut mounted the Stars and Stripes on the back of the Japanese Kibo module and played with the interior displays. He then published the results on social media.
Two of the photos show Dominic gliding through Kibo in different ways – one with him zooming in on the photo like a superhero and another catching him on a space slide. The smile on his face is infectious.
Connected: NASA astronauts send Fourth of July message to Earth from ISS (video)
Dominick described how the timing errors were staged: “It was the lights. We manually activated our flashes. Ambient light from computers and experimental LEDs only.” He also added some photo stats, for aspiring space photographers: 15 second exposures, f22, 24mm, ISO 500.
For a photo, he got most of the long-duration Expedition 71 crew and the two Boeing Starliner astronauts (in space for a shorter mission) to join him at Kibo. Each astronaut used his own light source to illuminate himself in the half-darkness of the research facility.
The group was instructed to “fire your flash at will, within the 15-second exposure, of course,” Dominick explained in an answer to how they set it up.
While Dominick is using his free time to play with photos for fun, all astronauts are trained in orbital photography to help with vital Earth observations during their time in space.
“Astronauts often take beautiful pictures of the aurora borealis, nighttime city lights, and the skyline, but they can also photograph natural hazards like volcanic eruptions and wildfires from space,” NASA officials wrote in 2021. (Recently , for example, Expedition 71 captured pictures of Hurricane Beryl from space.)
“In fact, astronaut photography can play a crucial role in helping scientists and decision makers monitor hazards in near real time,” NASA’s post added. “While most traditional satellites only take pictures looking back at Earth, astronauts can capture images from a variety of angles.”