ISS Symphony: Dmitry Pisanko's Time-Lapse of Earth and Aurora from Orbit

A green aurora spreads across the curve of the Earth while the International Space Station's hardware stands in silhouette in the foreground. ISS Symphony, a time-lapse film edited by Russian photographer Dmitry Pisanko in June 2015, strings together astronaut photographs like this one and sets them to the music of Ludovico Einaudi.

ISS Symphony: an orbital time-lapse

Astronauts on the station photograph the Earth constantly, including long sequences of still frames that can be played back as time-lapse. NASA makes those images public through the Johnson Space Center's Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Pisanko downloaded sequences from that collection, processed them and cut them into a four-minute film. He reportedly spent three months finding the right score before settling on Einaudi, the Italian pianist and composer.

Played back at video speed, a sequence shot over many minutes passes in seconds. Cloud banks race past, coastlines slide by, city lights stream across the night side of the planet and the aurora ripples like a curtain in the wind.

The view from the International Space Station

• Altitude: about 400 km (250 miles) above the Earth, in low Earth orbit.
• Speed: roughly 27,600 km/h, one orbit every 93 minutes, or about 15.5 orbits a day. The crew sees around 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours.
• History: the first module, Russia's Zarya, launched on 20 November 1998, and the station has been continuously crewed since 2 November 2000.
• Partners: NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA and the Canadian Space Agency.
• Best window: the European-built Cupola, delivered in February 2010, has seven windows used for Earth observation.

Why the aurora looks green from orbit

Auroras form when charged particles from the Sun, carried by the solar wind, are funnelled by the Earth's magnetic field into the upper atmosphere. There they collide with oxygen and nitrogen and make them glow, mostly at heights above about 80 km, with a peak near 100 km.

• Green, the most common colour, comes from oxygen at 557.7 nm, at lower auroral altitudes.
• Red comes from oxygen too, at 630 nm, high up where the air is thinnest.
• Blue and purple come from nitrogen, at the lowest altitudes.

Because the ISS flies at about 400 km, it flies above most of the glowing layer. Astronauts see the aurora from the side and above, as a luminous band hugging the planet, which is exactly the view in the image above. The auroral oval is centred around 67° north and south, so both the northern lights and the aurora australis appear from orbit. In September 2011 the Expedition 28 crew filmed the southern lights over the Indian Ocean.

Northern lights from the ground

For a view of the sky from the ground, compare Joni Niemelä’s northern-lights photography, or continue with whales and the northern lights filmed in Norway. And for the colours side by side, see green auroras photographed from Earth and space.

Related reading

• 18 Green Aurora Photographs: From Arctic Landscapes to the Space Station
• Ten Northern-Lights Regions: Geography, Darkness and Realistic Expectations
• Ronn Murray’s Real-Time Aurora Film Near Fairbanks, January 2015
• Aurora Borealis in Real Time: Watch the Northern Lights Change Shape
• Kaspars Daleckis’s Latvian Aurora Time-Lapse
• Kwon O Chul’s Yellowknife Aurora Gallery

Sources