Astrophotography and the ISS with Don Pettit.

[MUSIC] Astrophotography has long been an admired area of interest. The hobbyists and professionals around the world, myself included. But what is it like to take photographs from space? Does microgravity help or hinder the process of capturing images from space? And how difficult it is to share files from an orbiting lab? [MUSIC] Welcome to T-minus Deep Space from N2K Networks. I'm Maria Varmausis. Our partners at NSF hosted a live downlink to the International Space Station with NASA astronaut Don Pettit. Don is an American astronaut and chemical engineer, best known for his orbital astrophotography and in-space inventions. He launched to the International Space Station aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft on September 11th, 2024 and is currently serving as a flight engineer and member of the Expedition 72 crew. Don will spend approximately six months on board the orbiting lab, conducting science experiments and maintaining the space station. NSF's Jack Beyer spoke to Don through a live downlink to the station. [MUSIC] I'm Jack Beyer from nasaspaceflight.com for T-minus Space. I had the opportunity to chat with astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station about the photography work that he's been doing to bring a new perspective to the world. Here's that 20-minute interview live from the International Space Station. Don, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. While you're in space, we have a limited amount of time here and I just want to jump right into questions if that's all right with you. That is perfectly fine with me. We're talking about imagery and astrophotography and images from space, one of my favorite topics. This is the coolest thing. All right, first right off the bat, why is ISS photography important to you and what are the challenges of taking photos in microgravity? Images from space help tell the story to people on Earth that don't have the opportunity to go into space. When your mission is over, it's photographs and memories, which reminds me of an album from Jim Croce. And if you don't have the photographs, all you've got are the memories and the stories you can tell. So the photographs help complete the story of what it means for human beings to expand into space and expand into this frontier. Fantastic. And that's part of the reason why we love your sharing of this stuff so much. Follow up to that. You recently captured starlink satellites from space and you compared them to cosmic fireflies. Did you set out specifically to capture these starlinks with that shot or was it sort of a surprise that happened along the way with some of your captures, intended for one purpose but showing another? Initially, the starlink started to show up in the imagery. And then I thought, let me see if I could just photo document the starlink. So the images that I've sent down that show the starlink satellites are ones that I intentionally did. And let me point out the fascinating data about these satellites, those bright reflections are only seen in an orbital environment from another orbit. Those reflections do not get down to Earth. So that's the surprising thing is what are all these bright flashes that took us a while to figure that out. Excellent. How does capturing major Earth events from space change your perspective on them and how do you think your unique point of view affects the conversation on Earth? It gives you more data to think about, to incorporate in your stories, in your way of life. If you view something on the ground, you can see for what? 10, 20, 30 miles is your sort of event horizon for viewing. Maybe on top of a mountain, you could see further. Then you get in an airplane and you can see for hundreds of miles and that changes your perspective. When you get on space station, our event horizon, our field of view is about 4,000 kilometers. So it really changes the perspective of what you see. You see the same thing, but it gives you a different perspective. Recently, new cameras, lenses, some ND filters and other equipment have been brought to the ISS. Is there imagery that you can capture now that you couldn't before? And is the newer technology allowing you to better share your vision? The newer technology is exactly that. It's newer technology and it allows us to operate and take the imagery in a manner that the older cameras would not allow. The lenses available now are faster. They could transmit more light. For example, this lens behind me here, this is a 15 millimeter wide angle lens. It looks like a telephoto lens, but it's an extreme wide angle and it is really fast. It has an f-stop of around 1.5 or in the vernacular of these cinema lenses, a t-stop of 1.8. So it lets in a lot of light in a wide angle view and allows us to collect imagery that was not possible even on my last mission, which was 12 years ago. Wow. Does microgravity affect the work that you're doing in getting these shots? Yes, it does in mostly a good way. Let me demonstrate that here. I've got this huge camera system set up and it's 800 millimeter telephoto lens with a solar filter. This state is a joy to work with here. You can have it on a little arm and because it is weightless, you don't need to worry about shlocking it around. You could just push it around with two fingers and do imagery in a way that you can't do on earth. But with this camera and this lens system, you'd have to have it on a big, scookum tripod in order to do imagery and here it's just a little arm or even free float and you could get your imagery done. So there are things that we could do up here that would make many photographers envious when they're heavy gear on these stout tripods. Nice. I see you're in the couple of there. Are there any considerations for shooting through the windows? Yes, pluses and minuses. The cupola here has four panes of, I'll say, transparent material. We have an outer pane which is not structural and it takes all the hits for micrometeorites and then we have two pressure panes and these are highly figured, highly polished, flat windows that are about an inch and a quarter thick each. And then we have an inner acrylic scratch pane to protect the pressure panes because you can imagine you don't want to be digging up the windows that hold the atmosphere in space station. You don't want to bust the windows. So we've got these acrylic scratch panes. And what this does, it gives you a stack that's maybe five inches thick with four panes. That's eight surfaces, each one giving a bit of a reflection and you're always trying to fight reflections off the windows in a way that you typically don't need to worry about on earth. So you brought a home-built tracking device up to the ISS to take photos with. Can you talk about why building your own device was needed and the sort of capabilities it brings to your photography? Yes. Station when it goes around earth, it takes 90 minutes to go around earth and it keeps the same side pointed towards earth. So think of it, the belly button, the station stays pointed towards earth as it goes around. And in the process of doing that, station then rotates once every orbit about itself and that rotation keeps you from taking long time exposures of the stars. So you can make star trail pictures, but you can't have stars as pinpoints. And what I wanted to do was make a tracking system that instead of rotating once every 24 hours to counter earth's rotation, which is what amateur astronomers do on earth, this device rotates once every 90 minutes so it counteracts the rotation attitude motion of station. And now it allows you to photograph stars as pinpoints. You could do time exposures. And I've got it here behind me. Let me see if I can show you here. Here's this wide-angle lens and it's on a Bogan arm. And right here, it's kind of mounted down on station, is this device. This one is a wind-up device. It has a little clock motor, a little wind-up clock motor that some friends of mine built this. The colleagues of mine at RIT. And you wind it up and it rotates once every 90 minutes. You can speed it up and slow it down about 10% to compensate for the altitude of station. And then this rotates and it allows the camera that you have on the rotation to move in the opposite direction. Station moves, therefore, stars remain fixed in your field of view. And you could do time exposures of star fields. And I've got two versions of this. One runs off of batteries and has a little stepper motor in it. And then I've got this mechanical version. Super neat. Just a quick follow-up. How does getting specific gear like the tracking rig up to the station work? Do you get like a small allotment of space or weight? Yeah. Every crew member gets the equivalent of a large handbag if you see what you can take on an airplane these days and carry on, say, a large-ish backpack, you know, a rug sack. You get something like that that you can put in for your personal kit. You can put anything in it that will get through the NASA safety review. Everything you fly up is reviewed by a number of folks. And I wanted these tracking systems instead of flying mementos for family and friends, I wanted to fly something I could actually use on station to collect imagery that previously was not possible. So I filled my little rug sack, my personal kit with stuff I could use on this mission, and putting in these two drives. I call them an orbital sidereal drive. Sidereal is the normal 24-hour or near-24-hour rate that you need to make stars stationary if you're an astronomer. And so I call this an orbital sidereal drive. And it was important to me to fly two versions just in case, you know, we're NASA, we always have backups. You know, NASA engineers wear both belts and suspenders. And so this was my version of that, a wind-up device and then a device that runs off of batteries with a stepper motor. So cool. Thank you so much for filling your rug sack with photography gear because the mementos you're giving us are the images. Next question. We'll be right back after this quick break. You capture so many photos on the ISS that editing and sharing all that much data must be a challenge. What sort of workflows does the ISS use to share all the imagery while allowing you to still edit and fully execute your creative vision? We have support people on the ground, both in the astronaut office and in the photo TV group, people whose career it is to distribute and work on the imagery that we collect from Space Station. And during the mission, I rely on these people heavily because I want to spend my time on Space Station collecting the primary data, the imagery. I don't want to spend my time on station sitting in front of a computer. I could do that at home and the heavy image processing will be done after this mission. And I only do enough image processing here on station to verify that the images I'm taking are good and fall within the realm of what I want. And then I downlink everything to the ground and I don't mess with the images anymore. So the images that you're seeing on social media right now are ones that I've either sent down as raw and folks on the ground have spiffied up for me and posted through proxy posting or images that I've done a little bit of processing up here just to make sure that the imagery is okay. And then I get back using my off-duty time to take more images. Fantastic. So there's so much more to come when you're back on Earth. All of us love to see the photos you've taken while on the ISS. How much of your photography is scheduled out as part of your work or are you just regularly using up every scrap of your free time to share your view with the world? Most of our work is actually that. We have a timeline. People have thought hard and figured out how we as crews should spend our time on orbit. And as you can imagine with all the science and engineering research going on and then the maintenance, it all has to be orchestrated. And we take pictures during these operation tasks to show what we've been doing. And there are kind of pseudo-boring engineering pictures of clogged urine filters and things like that. All the EarthOB pictures, all the pictures that you see that shows what life is like on station, these are all done in astronauts off-duty time. We typically have no time scheduled to just take beautiful pictures of Earth and show what it's like up here. That it's a labor of love and that's what astronauts spend a lot of their off-duty time doing is doing imagery, collecting the photographs that go with the memories to tell the story of what it's like up here. It really makes such a huge difference. So thank you for spending your free time doing that. It's just utterly huge. Next up, you and your son documented Starship's recent sixth flight and you pulled off shooting it from the ISS. Can you share some details about that experience and the challenges involved capturing it? Yes. Part of it is just dumb luck in terms of orbital mechanics. We happened to be within sight of Boca Chica during the launch. If the launch were delayed 20 minutes, we wouldn't have even been able to see it. But it was just the way the clockwork of orbital mechanics and the schedule for launching worked out. We happened to be overhead. And then it's just a question of knowing how to use your photography equipment, which lens to use, what kind of shutter speeds, exposures, ISO, that kind of stuff, and which window to look out in order to get the imagery. When I had help on that photograph, that series of photographs, Sonny Williams was in the cupola with me. And I was busy looking through the lens and she was basically being the spotter saying, "Oh, I can see it over there." When I was pointing in a different direction. And so she got me oriented towards the right direction. Nice. What has been the most unexpected or personally significant image or event you've captured during this mission? I did some imagery of freezing thin wafers of ice so that you could look at the interlocking single ice crystals under polarized light. And I happened to have access to a freezer that goes down to minus 100 degrees centigrade. And that was really a fun bit of imagery to look at the crystal structure of ice when it freezes in microgravity. That's one set of imagery. The other imagery is just what I'm working on right now, which is using this orbital sidereal drive to do starfield pictures that previously have not been possible. Well, Don, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. And again, thank you so much for using your time to create images that no one has ever seen before. Because when you make images like that, it really helps bring home spaceflight to people. So thank you. Well, that's it. Thank you so much to NASA and Don Pettit for making this interview a possibility. It was truly a dream come true. For nasaspaceflight.com, I'm Jack Beier. Now back to T-Minus Space. That's it for T-Minus Deep Space, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. A special thank you to our friends at NSF for sharing this recording with us. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in this rapidly changing space industry. T-Minus Deep Space is an N2K production and produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. [Music] (gentle music)