Since fireworks were not allowed on the space station, NASA astronauts improvised with camera flashes to celebrate Independence Day.
International Space Station Astronaut (ISS) Matthew Dominick played around with “light painting” — a long exposure in a dark room that illuminates an object with a light source — during Expedition 71’s 4th of July time off.
“No fireworks on the ISS so we used camera flashes instead. Today we experimented with ‘painting with light,'” Dominick wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Between his regular duties, Dominick was already practicing time-lapse photography on the orbital complex, capturing stunning images of Earth and the space station in motion. But for the American holiday, a NASA astronaut mounted the stars and stripes on the back of Japan’s Kibo module and played with the displays inside. He then published the results on social networks.
Two of the photos show Dominick swinging over Kibo in different ways – one zooming in on him like a superhero and the other capturing him more like a space fall. The smile on his face is contagious.
Related: NASA astronauts send Fourth of July message to Earth from ISS (video)
Dominick described how the time-lapses were staged: “I turned off the lights. Manually activated our own flashes. Ambient light only from computers and experimental LEDs.” He also added some photo stats for budding space photographers: 15 second exposures, f22, 24mm, ISO 500.
For one photo, he got much of the long-term Expedition 71 crew and two Boeing Starliner astronauts (in space on a shorter mission) to join him at Kibo. Each astronaut used their own light source to illuminate themselves in the semi-darkness of the research facility.
The group was instructed to “fire their own flash at will, within a 15-second exposure of course,” Dominick explained in response to how they staged it.
While Dominick uses his free time to have fun playing around with photos, all astronauts are trained in orbital photography to help with important Earth observations while in space.
“Astronauts often capture beautiful images of the aurora borealis, nighttime city lights, and the skyline, but they can also photograph natural hazards such as volcanic eruptions and fires from space,” NASA officials wrote in 2021. (Most recently, Expedition 71 captured images of Hurricane Beryl from space .)
“Astronaut photography can actually play a key role in helping scientists and decision-makers monitor hazards in near real-time,” NASA added. “While most traditional satellites only take pictures looking straight down at Earth, astronauts can take pictures from different perspectives.”