Astronaut Matthew Dominick was going about 17,500 mph or more above Earth when he looked out his window and saw this amazing sight.
Dominick, who launched to the International Space Station in March as commander of the NASAS ‘ SpaceX Crew Mission-8 took out his camera and snapped the photo above. Taken on the 4th of July, the image is as stunning as any fireworks display at home.
Under a thin curl of MONDAY it is a high bed of so-called translucent clouds, floating in the calm before the turbulent dawn of sunrise. These strange high-flying clouds on the edge of ROOM — misleading to scientists just two decades ago — are easy to observe from the station’s orbit about 250 miles above Earth.
“We’ve had so many amazing sunrises lately with amazing cloud cover.” Dominick said in X, formerly Twitter. “Probably about 1,000 images taken in the last week.”
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The tweet may have been deleted
Since at least the 19th century, astronomers have looked to the sky and wondered about this type of cloud, the highest in Earth’s atmosphere. Rain clouds tend to form no more than 10 miles up, but light clouds stay about 50 miles above the planet’s surface in a layer of the atmosphere known as the mesosphere.
From the ground, people have often referred to them as “clouds that shine at night” because their height allows them to continue to reflect sunlight even after sunset. In summer, these iridescent clouds glow at dusk and dawn near the North and South Poles.
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Bright, mysterious nocturnal clouds appear over Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in July 2011.
Credit: NASA / Dave Hughes
How they formed remained a mystery until NASA Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) mission in 2007. Scientists knew that nocturnal clouds could change with latitude and solar activity, but they didn’t understand why.
With a spacecraft orbiting 350 miles above Earth, researchers learned that clouds form when ice crystals condense in the meteorite’s smoke, tiny particles from shooting stars that burn in the atmosphere. Perhaps even more surprising was that the ice within the mesosphere forms in a single continuous layer.
NASA’s AIM mission took the first global image of the polar iridescent cloud in June 2007.
Credit: NASA
In its first year, the mission documented the “life cycle” of nocturnal clouds in the Northern Hemisphere, which began in late May and continued through August. The satellite, which was only planned for a two-year study, returned 16 years worth of data her battery died last year.
His observations led to many discoveries, including how events closer to the ground can cause changes in clouds and how the icy layer in the upper atmosphere can cause eerie radar echoes in the atmosphere during the summer. Scientists credit the spacecraft’s success, especially given the hurdles it overcame early in its mission: A broken receiver forced the NASA team to figure out how to reprogram it to communicate in Morse code.
One of the latest findings from the mission is how humans influence cloud formation. or 2022 study published in the journal Earth and Space Science found that morning missile launches in fact, it can create glowing clouds farther from the poles, over southern Alaska, central Canada, northern Europe, southern Scandinavia, and south-central Russia.
The International Space Station crew sees glowing clouds in the late afternoon over the southern tip of South Korea on July 1.
Credit: Matthew Dominick / Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit / NASA Johnson Space Center
The researchers compared the ship’s observations with the timing of departures south of 60 degrees north latitude. What they found was a strong correlation between morning departures and nighttime cloudiness at relatively lower latitudes.
Despite the end of the AIM mission, said Cora Randall, deputy lead investigator in a statement that scientists will continue to make new discoveries based on the data.
“There are still gigabytes upon gigabytes of AIM data to study,” she said.