If you're looking for a contact high of the Overview Effect today, the short film "From Above" might just be the ticket. The documentary features an interview with veteran astronaut and photographer Don Pettit, set against a collection of otherworldly ISS footage."Apart from everything else an astronaut does in orbit, photography is actually part of our job," Pettit says in the film. "These pictures in themselves represent a scientific data set recorded over 14 years."
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Pettit shared some of the challenges of photographing from outer space, including the quick clip of the ISS in orbit. "You are moving at eight kilometers a second," he said. "That's fast, and so you have to be able to slew the camera at the same rate of orbital motion while you're taking pictures to actually get the sharpest imagery."
He would know, since he was the engineer who invented the ISS's barn-door tracker, a camera mount capable of compensating for the station's movement relative to Earth.
Pettit build the tracker out of spare parts he found around the early ISS back in 2003. Incidentally, he also invented an awesome zero-g coffee mug in 2009, so he wouldn't have to drink coffee from a straw. This is a man who has his priorities straight.
The film is only about four minutes long, and is packed with dramatic images of auroras, city lights, lightning storms, and other phenomena that are best viewed from a satellite cupola. And if you need a bigger fix, you can browse ISS timelapse footage by region at NASA's Gateway to Astronaut Photography.
