Speed

A bonkers image. The international space station passed over us just after 6pm, so before I started cooking our meal I speculatively pointed my camera and lens at it and hoped for the best. Hand held and a really slow shutter speed, and an object that keeps moving on its orbital trajectory, I wasn’t expecting any result, so I’m quite pleased with this attempt. Sitting in the middle of a huge urbanised region extending from Greater Manchester to Liverpool we don’t see dark skies, so I was surprised to see so many stars in the image, revealed I assume by the slow shutter speed. The edge of our gutter also features - I was leaning out of our bedroom window.

I’ve tagged this for tiny Tuesday on the basis that from my perspective nearly everything in the night sky is a pinprick of light. In reality, the ISS aside, space contains inconceivable enormities. We sit in an obscure place on a minor spur of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains billions of stars, including our sun, and is estimated to be 600,000 trillion miles across. And it is only one of many billions (or even trillions) of galaxies. It is infinitely awesome.

The ISS must be the one place where Russia and the West are actively cooperating still. I imagine the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard steer clear of talking about quite a few things up there in order to get on.