Skip to main content

ISS astronaut’s stunning time-lapse video includes the Milky Way

An image taken from the ISS showing featuring Earth, an aurora, the Milky Way, and the station itself.
A still image from the time-lapse video, which you can watch below. Matthew Dominick/NASA

A NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has shared a breathtaking time-lapse video featuring Earth, an aurora, the Milky Way, and the station itself.

Matthew Dominick, who’s been on the orbital outpost since March, shared the amazing 27-second sequence (below) on social media on Sunday.

Recommended Videos

“A time-lapse of solar arrays reflecting aurora and city lights as they align themselves for the impending sunrise,” Dominick wrote in the post, adding: “The solar array light reflections were so mind-blowing that I stayed up till 1 a.m. to shoot a few more sunrises. Luckily, we get sunrises every 90 minutes.”

A timelapse of solar arrays reflecting aurora and city lights as they align themselves for the impending sunrise.

The solar array light reflections were so mind blowing that I stayed up till 1AM to shoot a few more sunrises. Luckily we get sunrises every 90 minutes.

One of the… pic.twitter.com/k2V4XM6weJ

— Matthew Dominick (@dominickmatthew) September 1, 2024

A time-lapse involves setting up a camera to automatically take multiple pictures of a scene at regular intervals. The images are then put together to create a video. Time-lapses are particularly effective at showing changes that occur slowly over a long period of time.

Currently on his first orbital mission, Dominick has quickly earned a reputation as an accomplished space photographer, with the astronaut also happy to share the methods and camera settings that he uses to capture the impressive imagery.

For this particular time-lapse sequence, the exposure was set at 1.6 seconds using a 15mm lens at f/1.8. The ISO was 6400 and the shutter fired every two seconds. The final time-lapse features 15 frames per second.

Commenting on his latest effort, he wrote: “There are so many great still shots in the time-lapse series, but the ‘dance’ the solar arrays do reflecting aurora and city lights is so cool to see with a time-lapse video. A still image does not fully capture it.”

But sometimes, for other scenes, Dominick said that he likes to set up a time-lapse and then pick out the best individual frames from the collection. “One of the techniques I have learned over the past few months to get great still photos is to set up lots of time-lapses to find great lighting,” the American astronaut wrote in his latest post.

Although their shared time aboard the ISS will be brief as Dominick is due home in the coming weeks, he’s hoping to learn a thing or two from experienced NASA astronaut and space photographer extraordinaire Don Pettit when he arrives at the station for a six-month stay later this month.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
London sparkles in astronaut’s gorgeous night shot from the ISS
London seen from the ISS.

A gorgeous image captured by a recent arrival at the International Space Station (ISS) shows the night lights of London gleaming 250 miles below.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit -- NASA’s oldest active astronaut at 69 -- arrived at the station last week on his fourth trip to orbit.

Read more
Time-lapse from ISS shows lightning and mysterious red light
Earth in a time-lapse captured from the ISS.

In his final weeks aboard the space station after six months in orbit, NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick has shared a gorgeous time-lapse of Earth.

It shows a large part of Asia as the International Space Station (ISS) passed over it at night at an altitude of about 250 miles. The footage, which you can watch below, shows numerous flashes of lightning over a wide area, bright clusters of city lights, and colored lights from fishing boats, which Dominick describes as “one of my favorite things to see at night from the ISS.” But it also shows a bright red light, the source of which Dominick is unsure about.

Read more
Crew Dragon is about to fly with empty seats for the first time. Here’s why
A Falcon 9 rocket launches from California.

NASA and SpaceX are making final preparations for the Crew-9 astronaut flight to the International Space Station (ISS), which is set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, September 26.

But this will be the first of SpaceX’s 13 crewed flights to the ISS since the first one in 2020 where there will be two empty seats on the Crew Dragon spacecraft. And there’s a very good reason for that. Let us explain.

Read more