Orbiting 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have an incomparable view of the cosmos that lies above the planet’s horizon. Hoping to take advantage of the cosmic window on the sky, NASA astronaut Don Pettit prepared for his mission to the ISS by packing a tracking device that helps him take long-exposure images of the surrounding stars and galaxies.
In a recent post on X, Pettit shared a photo he took from the porthole of the crew’s SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the ISS. The image shows a star-studded sky field and two galaxies from the local Milky Way group. “I operated a homemade tracking device that allows me to take the shutter speeds needed to photograph star fields,” Pettit wrote on X. “Stay tuned for more photos.”
Pettit’s homemade star tracker – a motorized mount that is installed between the camera and tripod to counteract the movement of the stars – is amazing. It allows us to see a clear view of the stars from low Earth orbit instead of the usually blurry photos taken from the ISS.
The two galactic shapes belong to the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, LiveScience reports. They are both the closest neighbors of the Milky Way and can be seen in the night sky from the southern hemisphere.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy located about 160,000 light-years from Earth, containing about 30 billion stars. Its smaller counterpart, the Small Magellanic Cloud, is a dwarf galaxy with about 3 billion stars. It is located a little further away, about 210,000 light years from Earth. Both galaxies are thought to act as galactic satellites, orbiting our Milky Way galaxy as it travels through space.
Petty’s image, which shows the two galaxies side by side, provides a perspective on the universe. This is not the astronaut’s first attempt to transmit images from the ISS. Earlier this month, Pettit filmed what he called “space fireflies” floating outside the space station, which were actually Starlink satellites reflecting sunlight.
The NASA astronaut launched to the ISS in September aboard the Russian crew’s Soyuz capsule as part of the Expedition 72 mission. At 69 years old, Pettit is NASA’s oldest active astronaut, having spent more than 370 days in space and more than 13 hours in spacewalks, according to NASA. After spending so much time in space, the astronaut is still curious about the space around him, and he takes us along for the ride.
