You Can See a Sunset From Space
An astronaut on the International Space Station shows us what she sees many times a day.
There are, right now, six people in space.
One of these people is American flight engineer Karen Nyberg. She has a Twitter account, and she—without much fanfare—has taken up the mantle of one Canadian astronaut, a certain Commander Chris Hadfield, who became Internet-famous, and then famous-famous, for tweeting pictures of Earth from the International Space Station.
Today, she tweeted this:
We often see the sun casting red/orange on clouds at sunset. Finally captured it. November 6. pic.twitter.com/g986QoKBiE
— Karen L. Nyberg (@AstroKarenN) November 6, 2013
Here’s a larger version of that image:
When the sun sets, we’re used to seeing the vital, cloud-reflected oranges and reds from the land. I did not realize that you could see sunsets like that while sweeping through the sky. And I further did not expect those hues to appear, without warning, there in my Twitter feed on an average Wednesday afternoon, alongside politics news and peppy links and pics from lunch.
There are people down there, on that Earth. And, while I wish there were more, there are people up there, in that sky. They’re like us, and we can be thankful for them.