Cupola

The view from the cupola

The cupola is the station’s bay window: seven panes on the side that always faces the Earth, 420 km up. From there the planet slides past at about 28,000 km an hour, one orbit every hour and a half, sixteen sunrises a day. Drag to look around; scroll or pinch to change the lens.

The station is where its latest orbital elements put it, flown forward with SGP4, the model the trackers use. This page is using the latest element set.

The ground is a mosaic of pictures NASA’s weather satellites took on yesterday. Their VIIRS cameras sweep the whole sunlit Earth each day around half past one in the afternoon, local time, so the clouds are a day old, lit by today’s sun. Where a day’s swaths miss, the gap is filled from the Blue Marble.

On the night side, the city lights are NASA’s Black Marble, the auroras follow NOAA’s OVATION forecast for the next half hour, and a thin green line of airglow sits 95 km up, as it does in the crew’s night photographs. The air itself is computed: sunlight scattered by molecules and haze, with ozone taking out some orange, which turns the limb blue and the terminator red.

Credits

• Imagery from NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS): VIIRS Corrected Reflectance (NASA LANCE), Blue Marble Next Generation and Black Marble (NASA Earth Observatory)
• Coastline water mask © OpenStreetMap contributors, through GIBS
• Orbital elements from CelesTrak; orbit propagation by satellite.js
• Aurora forecast from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center
• Land and borders from Natural Earth