Alexander Gerst is a man with an eye for aesthetic photography. The German astronaut, who has been on board the International Space Station (ISS) since June, hasn’t waited long before posting photos of the various things he is seeing from the heavens on social media.
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Over the past few weeks, we have already admired photos taken of Hurricane Florence, which hit the coast of the United States in mid-September. Another phenomenon that was documented was Typhoon Trami, which hit Japan later the same month. And then in July, Gerst posted a photo of the moon swimming in an incredibly beautiful blue shadow.
This time, the German astronaut took a photo of a sunrise as seen from space. In these four photos, we can see the heavens and that gradual hue of yellow and orange as the sun rises. The different shades in contrast with the blue sky on earth and the black sky in the background are truly breathtaking.
‘I don’t know any words, in any language, to match the beauty of an orbital sunrise,’ said Gerst on his twitter account.
A sunrise every 90 minutes
Alexander Gerst, 42 years old, took the lead on the ISS Horizon this week, on a mission led by the European Space Agency (ESA) and these photos were taken on 5th October. But even though on Earth, we only have the opportunity to see a sunrise once every 24 hours, Gerst and his team were able to see this amazing scene every 90 minutes. This explains why the ISS is constantly rotating around the Earth.
Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut, has already explained this phenomenon in 2016.
‘We experience 16 sunrises every 24 hours on the International Space Station as it takes us 90 minutes to do a complete orbit of our planet flying at 28,800 km/h. Of course, we don’t notice most of the sunrises as we are working inside, but every now and again I can take a picture,’ he explained on NASA’s website.
