The International Space Station Takes A Moonlit Flight Over North America

Here is a time-lapse video shot by the crew of the ISS on Feb. 4, 2012. The crew is 240 miles above Earth and traveling roughly 17,500 mph. At this speed tcountries and continents pass by within mere minutes.

Here, with the docked Soyuz and Progress vehicles in the foreground, we are looking southwest as the ISS travels east. At the beginning of the video it approaches the northwestern coast of the United States, with the lights of San Francisco and Seattle illuminating the coastline below. Passing over southern Canada, the moon reflects in the many rivers that snake across the land. Its light casts shadows onto components of the Station. As the dark blue expanses of the Great Lakes drift past to the south, the neon green glow of the aurora borealis appears above Earth’s northwestern limb, shimmering over the paler yellowish line of airglow. Eventually the ISS passes over southeastern Canada, Montréal and Cape Cod, heading out over the Atlantic. The moon manages to makes a shining appearance before the video fades. Although not “real-time”, this video (and several recent others like it) have been shot at a rate of one image per second, and the resulting slower frame rate more closely resembles the true speed of the ISS than previous videos, most of which were shot at wider intervals.