One astronaut, many cameras and 220 days of amazing images from space

In an undated image provided by Don Pettit/NASA, Don Pettit, NASA’s oldest active astronaut, with a camera in the International Space Station’s cupola module, where seven windows provide panoramic views of space and Earth. Don Pettit brought a photographer’s eye to orbit, capturing the artistry of the cosmos and our planet. (Don Pettit/NASA via The New York Times)

By Kenneth Chang

Don Pettit, NASA’s oldest active astronaut, returned to Earth on April 20, the day he turned 70 years old. That concluded his fourth trip to space — a busy 220 days at the International Space Station.

Like other crew members on the space station, Pettit conducted experiments, talked with students and exercised for hours to maintain his health and to stave off loss of bone density. But the most eye-catching work he performed in orbit was his photography.

Most people will never get a chance to go to space. “I could try to give them a glimpse through my imagery,” Pettit said during a news conference a couple weeks after his return.

Pettit noted that hard-core photographers always want to have a camera in hand. “I could look out the window and just enjoy the view,” he said. “But when I’m looking out the window, just enjoying the view, it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, a meteor. Oh, wow. Look at that. Man, there’s a flash there. What’s that?’ And ‘Oh, look at that, a volcano going off.’ It’s like, ‘OK, where’s my camera? I got to record that.’”

Sometimes he set up five cameras at once in the space station’s cupola module, where seven windows provide panoramic views of space and Earth.

Space photography is often much like night photography. Stars are dim, and exposures lasting seconds or minutes are needed to gather enough photons. But in orbit, nothing is sitting still. The space station is zooming around Earth at 5 miles per second, and Earth is also rotating.

Sometimes, Pettit took advantage of the motion for artistic beauty — lights below blurring into glowing lines, while the stars above traced arcs in the sky.

“I think these are a blend of both science and art,” Pettit wrote on the social platform X. “There is so much techno-geek stuff to see, or you can simply sit back and think ‘How cool.’”

In an undated image provided by Don Pettit/NASA, the Betsiboka River in Madagascar. Don Pettit/NASA via The New York Times)

Other times, the camera was mounted on an “orbital sidereal tracker” — a homemade device that Pettit brought up from Earth that would pivot slowly to counteract the motion of the space station so that the lens remained pointed at a particular spot in the sky.

The tracker enabled a 10-second exposure to capture a crystal clear image of the Milky Way above a cloudy Pacific Ocean just before sunrise. The blue-purple glow emerges from the scattering of sunlight off nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere.

In April, Pettit recorded a video of the ethereal rhythmic pulsations of auroras — the glowing light emitted when molecules in the atmosphere are bombarded by high-energy particles from the sun.

Sometimes the colorful lights were made by human activities, not cosmic phenomena. The green streaks in one picture are almost the same color as auroras, but they are the lights used by fishing boats off Thailand to attract squid.

With his camera pointing down at Earth, Pettit recorded lightning in the upper atmosphere above the Amazon basin in South America. For the video, the time was stretched in length to 33 seconds from about 6 seconds, revealing more structure in the flashes.

Pettit also took advantage of opportunities to capture the comings and goings of spacecraft from Earth — including a test launch of a SpaceX Starship rocket from Texas in November and the docking of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying cargo to the space station in December.

During his off-duty time, Pettit also concocted fun science experiments. One showed electrically charged water droplets dancing around a Teflon knitting needle. “I want to do things in space that you can only do in space,” he said. “And I’ll worry about catching up with TV programs and things like that after I come back.”

In another experiment, he injected food coloring into a sphere of water, creating a globule that somewhat resembled Jupiter, or a very pretty marble.

Pettit also dissolved an antacid tablet within a water sphere. Without gravity to make the bubbles rise and easily escape from the water, the patterns of plop, plop, fizz, fizz are completely different in space.

In an undated image provided by Don Pettit/NASA, Pettit, injected food coloring into a sphere of water on the International Space Station, creating a globule that somewhat resembled the planet Jupiter, or a very pretty marble. (Don Pettit/NASA via The New York Times

He also froze thin wafers of water ice at minus 140 degrees Fahrenheit. “What would you do with such a freezer in space?” he wrote on X. “I decided to grow thin wafers of water ice for no more reason than I’m in space and I can.”

Photographing the ice wafers through polarizing filters revealed intricate crystal patterns.

Pettit is the oldest current NASA astronaut, but he is not the oldest person to go to orbit. That was John Glenn, who was the first American astronaut to circle Earth in 1962, and then flew again in 1998 on space shuttle Discovery at the age of 77.

Pettit is not even the oldest person to spend time at the space station. A private astronaut, Larry Connor, was 72 years old when he spent two weeks there in 2022 as part of a mission operated by Axiom Space of Houston.

“I’m only 70, so I’ve got a few more good years left,” Pettit said during the news conference. “I could see getting another flight or two in before I’m ready to hang up my rocket nozzles.”