From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 397, NASA astronauts Don Pettit and Matt Dominick share their experiences capturing stunning photography from the International Space Station. This episode was recorded July 17, 2025.
Producer’s Note: Don and Matt provided us with much of the imagery discussed in this episode, so please check out those photos further down the page!
Transcript
Joseph Zakrzewski
Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 397: The Art of Astronaut Photography. I’m Joseph Zakrzewski, and I’ll be your host for this episode. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight and more.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station orbit Earth every 90 minutes, experiencing 16 sunrises and sunsets each day, and from 250 miles above the surface, they have a view of the planet like no other. It’s breathtaking, but capturing that beauty on camera that takes skill, practice, timing and a little bit of engineering know how.
Today we’re joined by two NASA astronauts who know their way around the station, apertures, and ISOs, Don Pettit and Matt Dominic. Between them, they’ve captured some of the most iconic images from orbit. We’ll hear how photography became a part of their space flight journeys, and what it takes to shoot incredible images in microgravity, and what shots they’d still love to capture the next time they fly.
Let’s strike a pose from station.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Hello, Don and Matt. Thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast today.
Don Pettit
We certainly do have a podcast!
Matt Dominick
Excited to be here.
Joseph Zakrzewski
The art of astrophotography and astronaut photography is something that is incredibly sophisticated and exciting, especially when you blend that mix of art and science. But I want to go back to your origin stories of what got you interested in this art form, and when you were able to go up on orbit on the International Space Station to maximize those opportunities to showcase that art form. So Don I would love to start with you, what got you into photography and what brought this interest to this level.
Don Pettit
My mother was interested in photography. She would take pictures that illustrate children’s stories with them, and she had a couple of pictures published in Life Magazine. So I grew up with photography in the household, and then when I was around six or seven, I got a Brownie, a Kodak Brownie camera. It’s a little brown box camera that shot, I think it was 124 film, and I’d shoot black and white, because that’s all I could afford, and I’d develop it and print, print the pictures out in with using the equipment that my mother had. So that’s how I got into photography, and I haven’t stopped since.
Joseph Zakrzewski
That’s a great way to start at that young of an age. Matt, how did you get involved and where did that interest begin for you?
Matt Dominick
I don’t think it was like a single point. It was just lots of little points along the way that kind of developed a desire to do that. I think chiefly for me. You know, growing up, my dad was a, was a photographer professionally for the Air Force, and then went into it, you know, in the private sector, then journalism, then also sales. And so watching him produce commercials for television or the various things in his occupation, and seeing what it really was about, or selling things was about, mostly about telling a story. And- because people remember things better if you tell it in a story, like you can give person a fact, and they’ll mostly remember it sometimes. But then if you tell them a story that you know, that’s it goes back to, you know, just the history of humans and how we remember things is through storytelling. And so for me, that photography was about watching my dad tell stories, and then growing up and learning the good way to tell a story, or frame a picture to tell a story, and then going on space. So few people get to do this, and I feel like a sense of obligation to share as much as I can with humanity in that regard. And so I think a good way to do that was to take a picture. And so, took, we took a lot of pictures, like a bunch, but oftentimes it wasn’t just about the picture. I liked it. I enjoyed telling the story of how, how the picture was taken, right? So, hey, I took this picture. I took 10,000 attempts to get this one frame just right. Here’s the struggle, here’s where I screwed up, here’s where I succeeded. And sharing that story, I think, shares what we see and what we do in space, it makes it more human.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Well, you rolled right into my next point is, when you became an astronaut, how did astronaut, how did that that thought process of wanting to tell a story? Because most of you know earthbound stories. You know what through, through landscapes, through portraits, through what we see around us here on Earth, but when you got that call to be an astronaut, was that one of the first few thoughts you thought of as this is an opportunity for me to, you know, to excel human space flight, but also it’s a chance for me to tell that story. Was that something that that really crossed your mind early on, and then how would you shape it given the opportunity?
Matt Dominick
I mean,when I was selected, my first thought was, was not photography. But there was a deep sense of, holy cow, this is actually happening. And then an immense feeling of, oh man, don’t screw this up. Like there’s so many people on this planet that want this job, and a lot of my, you know, a lot of people I knew were more than, if not more qualified than I was to do the job. And so you have this sense of, man, I got to not let them down. I can’t let my friends down. I can’t let others down. Who would want to be in this job. I had this six months sense of responsibility to not screw it up.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Don, how did you roll into becoming an astronaut and seeing this photography as an opportunity to to to Matt’s point, tell that story, and at the same time continue, you know the advancement of science and research, but at the same time you know, scratch that itch of photography from a very different perspective?
Don Pettit
Well, the way you become an astronaut is… drum roll: put in an application. And in my case, I had to do that four times over 12 years. You get the reject letter. It says, “Thank you for applying to the astronaut program due to a large number of highly qualified applicants. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And you know what the rest of the letter is going to say. And then finally, you get the letter that says, “Welcome to the astronaut program.” After that point, you’re pretty much buried in the training process the technical aspects of flying in space, because, like Matthew just said, you don’t want to screw that up. And once you get to the point where, wow, I’m flying in space soon, that’s when you start thinking about, how am I going to share this experience with everybody else that didn’t get a chance to fly into space. And that’s where my imagery comes in, sharing digital still images, or initially film images, because we were shooting film on my first mission. And then the videos, the video clips and then taking still images and making them into short time lapse clips. All of these are venues for sharing the experience.
Matt Dominick
I think, to pile on what Don’s saying there, is I spent a lot of time pre-flight, working with Don and others to figure out how I was going to capture time on Space Station, right? How? You know, I did some like, rough math in my head of like, well, I’m going to take maybe at least a quarter million images, if I can save myself two seconds per image in time expended. Because I’m so familiar with the camera, I don’t have to reference a procedure I can just see and without thinking execute, I can save myself a bunch of time. And you might think, well, six, eight months on Space Station is a long time to figure it out. It’s not. Things go by quickly, and so being able to jump immediately into it. Especially, goodness, that first, the first look out that window, you just feel this obligation to capture this. How do I share this view? Why is the dynamic range of this camera limited to what 14 stops my eyeball sees so much more than this. How do I capture that to share?
Don Pettit
And then, when your mission is over, it’s photographs and memories. That’s all you have. And the memories are inside of you, and you can share those as far as you can project your voice or maybe even having a podcast. But the images augment, in a very significant way, the stories that you can tell. And it’s photographs and memories after your mission. And if you don’t have the photographs, and you just have the memories. And you don’t want to find yourself on orbit picking up the camera and saying, “Now, how do you turn it on?” You need to know how to use your equipment, and you need to practice way before you even get close to a rocket.
Matt Dominick
Yeah, and then also, I’ve been, I spent some time looking at end to end. Meaning, okay, I’m going to get back and I’m going to have 25 terabytes of images. How am I going to manage this? How am I going to sort-
Don Pettit
Only 25 terabytes?! I have 60 terabytes of raw image.
Matt Dominick
I did the math on that problem before flight and started building infrastructure at my house. The payback cost is about two years, but keeping that amount of stuff in the cloud is very expensive, and so having that much imagery at home in this raw format, so just now building a server and structure to handle that in my house and then be able to quickly sort through it. And I was just doing that the other morning. Just it was, it was bringing back, like Don said, some really cool memories. I was going through pictures and laughing at some of the things we saw, did and and it, like I said, it brings stories. So as I go around the planet to go to a PR events, I can pull up an image and just have a single image and tell a five minute story about, wow, this is a crazy day on orbit. Here’s what happens. Here’s how we capture this image. Here’s the 10,000 images that failed.
Joseph Zakrzewski
It’s impressive to hear, and I should have said this as a precursor at the top, that if those listening at home, if you’re in a safe space to do so, please, as you’re listening to this podcast, pull up some of Don and Matt’s work, because it’s been phenomenal to follow along, whether on their social channels or through nasa.gov but you mentioned the telling of the stories and the amount of photos that you’ve taken over time and how many terabytes you need to sift through them all. Was there ever a time on orbit that you might have had a story or an idea of maybe what stories you might want to tell while up there? But then, once you arrived on the International Space Station, that story made a change, or something might have happened, or arrived at a conclusion to where you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t expect to tell this story. Here’s what I want to do with that opportunity.”
Don Pettit
All the time! You launch with preconceived ideas of, Wow, I want to do this kind of image and that kind of image. And here’s a neat solar image I want to do, and this and that. And then you get on orbit, and you take off in a different direction, and that’s you. The environment of orbit speaks to you and kind of leads you into directions that you didn’t anticipate. And that is the cool thing about being in a frontier, if if you could pre-think about everything that was going to happen, it would be a boring mission.
Matt Dominick
Absolutely, I think you you know the military concept would be, you know, no good plan survives first contact with the enemy. In this case, you know, all of the planning we did to go think about what pictures we’re going to take don’t survive first contact with operations. But that’s you shouldn’t that doesn’t mean you should forsake the planning. You do the plan. Planning so you understand all of the inputs and the outputs and the things that would matter, and then you can quickly adapt and adopt to your environment. And so I had been planning this piece of video to describe propellant transfer, because propellant transfer is important for the future of human spaceflight as we extend the moon to Mars, and I’d been thinking about it. And we had these water bottles in the dragon that were used that, you know, these classic plastic water bottles. And I thought about this thing. I wanted to do, this demo. I wanted to do with an adapting to connecting two bottles, bottles together. And we posted it after flight, but connected the two bottles together with the three printed adapter that I printed on Earth prior to going. So this is my plan. But I spent six months stressing about how I’m going to shoot this, and I tried a couple times, and it just didn’t work. It didn’t didn’t feel right, and just redid it. And then Don showed up, and then it hit me how I could, how we could shoot this.
Don Pettit
Everything went downhill real quick. Even though you’re in microgravity and there’s no downhill.
Matt Dominick
But it ended up being a much better story, because we failed a few times before we succeeded.
Don Pettit
Oh, you mean you squirt water all over me.
Matt Dominick
That was a win, but it wasn’t the plan.
Don Pettit
Good thing we had a lot of towels available.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Well, that’s a great point that you guys make, too. And some I wanted to dive into is, when you approach photography and storytelling, how do you manage that line of art and science? How do you, you know, make sure you capture the science elements that might be, you know, required of a situation or of an experiment or what you might see out the window, but do it in an artful way that still gives it a unique perspective, versus just straight, you know, point and shoot.
Don Pettit
I think it gets back to what Matthew was saying, you want to tell a story, and you set up a composition that tells a story. And, oh, by the way, if you shoot, maybe with a secondary camera that’s looking parallel or perpendicular, now you could get dimensions and changes as a function of time. And maybe you put a length scale in there, or at least shoot a few frames of the length scale, and now you can back out scientific information at the same time, you can have an artful story. So I think that’s central to preserving the scientific data you can extract from the imagery, as well as having an artful composition that tells a story.
Matt Dominick
I think we- one of our primary missions up there is science, and we have an incredible set of instructors here in Houston that train us how to do predominantly technical and scientific photography right making an accurate photo, getting proper lighting, so that when you send those images back to Earth for a science experiment, they can get the data they need. Or if, for the folks that are repairing the space station, if there’s something broke on the space station, getting an accurate image back with appropriate scaling so they can see the failure and make the correct engineering decisions. And so that’s very much a scientific approach or an engineering data approach that we were trained to do, but the art side takes it to the next step. And so like Don said, like the second camera is great, right? There were a couple of times Don was doing science experiments, but then I would have a second camera taking pictures of dawn, doing that, capturing the art of it, right? And I have some great shots of that. Or. One time we I kept taking this, you know, I got in this habit pattern of pushing the camera all the way up to the window frame to just focus on the thing outside, like a hurricane or a sprite or whatever. But that just kind of looks like a scientific image. It’s just the Earth. It’s just this, just that, but bringing in the human element to make it artful. Okay, let’s, instead of taking a picture of the hurricane, just the hurricane through the window, let’s show the human element. So back the camera out and expose it. So you’re exposed for the hurricane, but you have a depth of field later that, you can put a mask on it and then bring the window frame into it and show that, oh, there’s a human looking through a window from space at a hurricane that’s about to hit their house. That starts telling the story and bringing in the human element of the window frame. Oh, there’s a human looking through this one. So bring the window frame into the picture frame.
Don Pettit
Just to add to that, there are a number of different shapes of windows on orbit, and oval windows have a higher esthetic measure, to me, than a circular window or a trapezoid shaped window. So if you you have an oval window, and you back the camera up a bit, so you capture the frame of the window, I think it has a much higher esthetic measure than if it’s a circular window or or some other shape. And if you look on commercial airliners, most of the windows are oval in shape. And there’s, I think, a reason for that.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Well, and it makes it relatable. And that’s exactly what I was just thinking of, is, you know, whenever you know, whenever you take a, you know, a long form image or a still of, you know, a shot outside the aircraft when you’re in the clouds or hovering over your favorite city or a favorite landmark, you try and capture that oval because it kind of creates that foreground, middle ground background and gives it that human element. Well, speaking of that human element, just hearing you guys talk to each other, and before we really get into, you know, the challenges and unique challenges of shooting from space. Some- you know, it’s the atmosphere around you, it’s what presents itself that can influence you and inspire you. But how did you guys inspire each other? What did you do to bounce ideas off of each other, to work? Because as artists, you know, you have a vision in mind, but then you know, sometimes those influences of others, or perspective of others can help change some of that a little bit along the way. So it’s fun to hear you guys work back and forth of different, you know, methods, if you will, and perspectives. But in your time on orbit and here on the ground, how have you guys worked together or approached different opportunities together?
Don Pettit
All it takes is a bag of coffee and then add Matthew and I being in the same module.
Matt Dominick
We had, we had a blast at orbit, bouncing ideas off each other. I had sleep shifted to be a late night person, so I would stay up late taking photos, right? And Don would be up super early taking photos. And then we had a brief period of a few hours in the middle of the day that we could overlap, overlap and, like, pass ideas back and forth. But there was one night. What was it? Was it a comet? It was the comet? Yeah, Don had just gotten to orbit and just go into space, like, it takes a minute to adapt, and Don was tired, and it was way past Don’s bedtime. But we have this really cool problem in space is that you can see something cool out the window over Earth, but you’re, for the most part, going to come back to that kind of same spot 90 minutes later. And so there were a couple times in orbit like I was with Jeanette, one time we were in the cupola and we saw an insane lightning storm over Africa. And I was like, wait a minute, we’re going to go back over the same lightning storm in 90 minutes, because it’s so big, like you shift on the earth a fair distance. But this lightning storm covered a, you know, time zone and a half. I was like, “Oh, we’re gonna see this again.” So I set up cameras for the next 90 minutes, and then cap ended up capturing a sprite. So similar concept with with Don one night. It was like, Don, we got to see this comet. We got to see this comet in the Aurora. And Don was like, I’m going to bed. He’s like, I’m going to bed. It’s like, just 90 minutes Don.
Don Pettit
It’s only 90 minutes. It’s already past my bedtime.
Matt Dominick
90 minutes past your bedtime, but I’m completely I was like, Well, Don, I’ll be there by myself. You’re gonna miss this really cool stuff. But I gave a whole bunch of FOMO, and 90 minutes later, Don, half awake comes in, all right, let’s look at this. And it was pretty cool.
Don Pettit
Yeah, we were lucky enough to cross paths with three comets, although one of the comets was the last one shortly before I returned, was still just a little faint blob in the sky, but the two other comets were actually pretty impressive. As far as comets go, and you’re it’s dumb luck when you happen to have some kind of natural phenomenology like that, whether it’s a total solar eclipse or the transit of Venus or a comet, any of these fairly rare cosmic events, if it happens during your six month stay or your seven month stay on station, that you’re really lucky, and you better know how to use your camera equipment so that you can capture it.
Matt Dominick
Oh, yeah, we were super lucky. We had this total- We literally threw flew through the solar eclipse. And then we had insane Aurora, with all the activity with the sun and the comet. Goodness. We were lucky.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Wow. Well, and on that too. And before we again, I keep going, we’re going to get into the technical aspects to have your photography too. Was there ever a moment on station when you were taking photography, whether it was, you know, of the of the sprites, which we’ll dive into. What those are, hurricanes, the solar eclipse, transit of Venus. Were there ever moments on orbit where you had the camera in front of you? You were peering through the lens, trying to frame it up just right? But the the moment itself was just so unique, so inspiring, so reflective and self reflective that you, you know, may have had to take a take a beat to just reflect on what you’re able to witness you personally, but also through the lens. Was there ever a time like that that you can that you can reflect on?
Matt Dominick
Yes.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Can you share, pretty please?
Matt Dominick
We had specific times during our increment where we just, kind of a couple of us would just say, all right, no pictures. There were just sometimes the Aurora that we would just be like, All right, because it can be a lot in the cupola with multiple people firing, trying to capture, like, the moment with Aurora. And there were a couple times we just agreed, all right, no cameras. And like, three of us would sit in the cupola and just in, just take the moment in, because you can only capture so much with a camera, especially the transitions. When you go from light to day or day to night by to day, day to night. You know what I’m talking about. The transitions are tough. So we had a couple times this crew would like, we’re just gonna be cameras down, enjoy this moment.
Joseph Zakrzewski
I love that. And it just, it allows you just to breathe it in, like you see, you know, times you’re on Earth where you go to a concert or a wedding where you just, like, put the cameras away and just be present.
Don Pettit
Rocket launches are a good example of that. Maybe you’re three or four miles away and the rocket goes off and you’re standing there with your iPhone or something like that, maybe you’d be better off just to watch the rocket launch. And then there’s dozens of professional photographers there. You could just grab one of their pictures off the internet when you want to illustrate with other folks. There’s there’s something extraordinarily human with you just take in the event where you’re not worried about f-stop and shutter speed and composition and looking through the lens of a camera.
Matt Dominick
Yep, Don taught me that when I went to a rocket launch. And I remember going to the rocket launches later and passing that on. And now my recommendation is, if you go see a rocket launch, it’s just watching humans fly to space is insane. It’s an emotional event, especially if you know the people on the rocket. And the advice is, just take one selfie with a rocket in the background, and then just make sure you enjoy the event.
Don Pettit
Same thing with a total solar eclipse. If you’re fortunate enough, you’ve got maybe two minutes, set a camera up on a tripod on automatic, and then just sit there and watch it and take in whatever the human emotion is for the total eclipse, and then look at your imagery afterwards.
Joseph Zakrzewski
I think it’s a beautiful way to encapsulate what you guys do with photography is it invokes an emotion with what you’re snapping, whether on orbit or here on the ground. And I like that tip of take a selfie, but just be present in the moment. Well, now let’s dive into some of those unique challenges you talked about. You know, lighting and different elements that you have to go through to to accomplish what you were able to do while on the International Space Station or in transit. What are some of those technical and environmental challenges that we here on earth don’t necessarily think about that you might have had to adjust, whether it’s in your training or on the fly in conversations between you two, because I know if we’re snapping photos on Earth, we’re thinking about where the sun is, where the clouds are, what the positions are, the shadows. But when lighting looks a little different, when the Earth itself looks a little different from your perspective. What are some of those challenges you had to overcome and use, or even use to your advantage while, while on the International Space Station?
Don Pettit
I’d say the number one challenge is windows. You only, you can only take pictures of Earth wherever there happens to be a window, and you can’t move over three feet to change the composition to something that’s a little better, because then you’d be looking at the inside of an aluminum hull. So you’re stuck with what you can see out the windows, and you can vary the angle of the camera around a little bit, maybe shift the composition somewhat, but you’re stuck with where the windows are, and it gets worse before it gets better. These windows, typically you have two pressure panes, which you want two pressure panes In case one fractures, right? So you don’t, you know, like in the tacky sci fi movies where somebody gets sucked out a window, you don’t want that to happen to you. So it’s good to have two pressure panes. So that’s four reflective surfaces right there. And then there’s common to have a debris pane on the outside. And this is another pane that protects the pressure pane from getting whacked by micrometeorites, as it can compromise the integrity of a pressure pane. And again, you don’t really want that think back to these tacky sci fi movies. So that adds two more surfaces. So now you got six reflective surfaces, and then, because crew members have greasy noses and greasy heads, and they, you know, greasy fingers and these things always end up getting wiped on the inside of the window there’s a scratch pane. And that adds and the scratch panes, again, are somewhat expendable, and you’ve got two more surfaces. So if you glarp up the scratch pane, then you could replace the scratch pane, and you haven’t glarped up the pressure pane. So now this whole stack, it has eight reflective surfaces, and the NASA engineers will do their best to put anti reflection coatings on these, but you’re still going to have significant reflection off of all of these eight reflective surfaces. And the depth of this might be a five or six inches, so you’re kind of looking through a tunnel with eight reflective surfaces, and that could be a bane of doing imagery, both daytime and nighttime imagery.
Matt Dominick
Windows are, windows are tough. The extreme dynamic range is tough, right? You have the brightest of brights, the darkest of darks, and trying to capture that with the camera, we have some pretty cool tools, right? That I think the Z 9 is 14 stops or so, 15 stops of dynamic range. One of the things we learned, or I learned, specifically on orbit early, was was picking an ISO that has more dynamic range than others, and accepting some of the noise as a result or not, accept reducing that. I think the when people, you know, folks around the office who are about to fly, been asking me for Hey, what should I do about this? And I said, the one thing, like, if you just can remember, one thing is, is under expose. I don’t know exactly the the science behind it yet. Maybe don you could back me up on this, but I think as we transition to we transition to mirrorless cameras, where you’re not looking through an optical chain, you’re looking at, you know, a digital screen through the view finder, it just the whole dynamic range isn’t represented. And so I think I had a tendency early on to overexpose, and then I’m finding later that a lot of those images, I’ve lost some data, because it’s all, it’s all, it’s all white, just on the bright side. So underexposed the images and I’m taking I’ve seen some really, really dark images that come to the viewfinder or or in their raw form of the computer, or dark. But when I, you know, open it up with a computer, I can see so much, and I’m like, Oh man, I wish I’d underexposed more images.
Don Pettit
And a lot of recovering the detail in the underexposed image centers around having large bit range for each pixel. And currently our cameras are 14 bit which is like one part in 16,000 and if you could go to 16 bit, man, then, then the amount of detail you can pull out is, is amazing. And, and if you’ve, oh, if you’ve saturated a pixel, if you’ve made snow white, whiter than snow white. There’s no, no more information you can pull out of that. But if you’re you’re under exposed, and you’ve got enough dynamic range in terms of your bit depth you can, you could stretch that post flight.
Matt Dominick
Yeah, I spent I started shooting. Because I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, and I had server space, I started shooting bracketed images. So every every trigger spree squeeze on the camera, or, I guess you say shutter release, but every shot a release of the camera, you I would shoot three shots, or sometimes five shots across, you know, maybe minus four, minus two, straight on, plus two, plus four. So I’d shoot five shots with every shutter release, just so that I could bracket it and figure out, Okay, later, you know the minus two. And so I remember one time specifically, I was in the cupola. Mike Barratt was there, crewmate, and he was shooting. I was shooting. I just saw the way the moon was coming up and the clouds was awesome. And so I literally just put the camera over his shoulder and just shot it really quick, and it being one of my favorite images of the way the moon was coming up. But the key to that image was I was shooting five, you know, a 5-f bracket. And the one shot that ended up being perfect was the one that was one over 32,000 on shutter speed. It was the really, really dark image that was able to pull out so much detail, right? I didn’t have time to sit there and get the settings right. The timing was just right. And that would be the other challenge of taking pictures in orbit is how fast we’re moving. So you’re moving so fast you can watch the moon rise. You could physically see it moving and so quickly, shooting over somebody else’s shoulder, through eight reflective surfaces and getting it just right. It’s kind of nice to have a single squeeze of the shutter release, popping off five images.
Don Pettit
And talking about bracketing, the overexposed images, when you say, say you you want three levels of underexposed, three stops of underexposed. Said, You’ve got to take the extra two to three stops of overexposed which typically doesn’t have the information you want, and I figured out with the Z9 how to do three underexposed pictures without getting the two overexposed pictures so you so you could capture the same thing with three images, instead of taking five and having to throw two away.
Matt Dominick
Oh, Don told me about this when he was on orbit and I was still on Earth, and I was like, Ah, why didn’t I think of this?!
Don Pettit
Yeah,it’s just, it’s the nuances of these professional level cameras that NASA provides, both trading for and we have them on orbit. There’s a lot of different settings and understanding how you can mess with the settings to do things that maybe the camera wasn’t really intended to do, but you want to warp fade so that you can capture the imagery you have in mind. And it takes a good understanding of the camera operation in order to do that.
Matt Dominick
Yeah, so I think the first piece of advice is underexpose. The second one, well, I don’t know which one’s first. Maybe the other ones first, the one of them is critical to understand the first principles of what is going on in your camera. Understand how the you know CCD works. Understand like there’s so many pixels there, understand the bit depth that Don talked about. Understand aperture, shutter, ISO and how they relate and what the trade offs are, right? If I need to fast shutter speed because the earth is moving, what am I willing to compromise in terms of ISO and accepting noise with ISO, understanding that there’s two native ISOs in the Z9 just understanding the physics of what your camera’s doing, because then you can adapt to any operational environment real time. Like you can go, oh, that’s something I hadn’t predicted, a scenario I hadn’t expected to be in. But because I understand first principle physics of how my camera works, I know how to all the trades and balance these things real time to get an image in a short period of time.
Joseph Zakrzewski
You guys touched upon so many elements that I really wanted to dive into. And one of them was, I mean, we touched a little bit about lighting, which I want to come back to. But you know you’re talking about, you know, trial and error, what works best and what settings work best. So let’s talk about self editing. When you’re on orbit, do you have opportunities to self edit and self critique your work? Because, like you said, you’re trying to capture certain moments in certain ways, and you may get that, you know, like that five frame at different settings that you’re looking at. But how can you use that information in real time to make real time adjustments on the fly?
Don Pettit
Okay, okay, Matthew…
Matt Dominick
I’m having a good time watching Don’s body language while you ask this question.
Don Pettit
Yeah, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna talk about the gorilla in the room, or the pink elephant, or whatever. Odd station. The we have laptop computers that we use for basically running station, and they’re a GUI front end for actually running the real computers that physically operate station. And these computers do their job exceedingly well, but they’re like 15 year old technology. And if you want to use them for doing advanced image analysis, they don’t work very well. And you can’t even play a 2k movie without it skipping and stopping about every five seconds. You could play, you could play an HD video, but if you’re using like a Z 9 camera, and you’re shooting an 8k video, you can’t even watch the video. You can’t even see what you’ve done unless it’s in the camera itself. So that’s so you ask, how do we review these image the images we shot, still images, even, even with a 45 megabit per still image kind of thing, it it’s kind of slow to review these things on orbit. And it’s something that I would do enough review to see if I’m getting technically good images and if the composition is along my line. And then I don’t review anymore because I would rather take more pictures. Rather than spend an hour looking at a computer trying to see how the pictures were that I just took, I’d rather take that extra hour and take more pictures. Anyway, after you understand that the imagery you’re taking seems to be working.
Matt Dominick
That’s that’s the important part. You don’t have an you don’t want to spend time in this unique place editing images when you could be taking more. But it’s super important to make sure that you’re not taking terrible images. So you need to do some level of review. And I was able to leverage a lot of good folks on Earth, saying, shooting a bunch of images down and saying, “Hey, is this? Is this working?” And some good folks on Earth would go look at them and go, Hey, tweak this. Tweak that give me some advice, fix this. And then that feedback loop would drive better images later. But just spending that kind of time wasn’t available, and the speed of computers isn’t such. So doing time on there’s, there were some other options that you could put it onto an iPad that’s got a better dynamic range than the computers on Earth, and you could see a little bit more detail in those pieces. But take more pictures
Joseph Zakrzewski
Kind of lends to the terabyte sizes that you guys are talking about for the amount of photos you talk and you were saying you’re still coming through some of them and reliving what you’ve done.
Matt Dominick
I mean, I took while I was in orbit, I took, like, the ones that were really obvious, made quick edits to them, and then pushed them off to social platforms and then to NASA, saying, Hey, this is one we should highlight. But those were just the really easy ones to kind of approach. Looking at them now, I’m going through more of the technical ones now that I’ve built I’ve been focusing for six months, since they’re back on infrastructure, so I’ve been building infrastructure and workflows to take that imagery and then make products from it, or make, you know, cool stuff from it. But I’ve just been focused on infrastructure and workflows only. I’m getting close, probably within a couple of weeks, of transitioning to pushing and pushing imagery out the stuff that hasn’t been released yet.
Don Pettit
Yeah, and talking about the infrastructure, the just memory that you need. You could take a 45 megabyte raw image, and you could work on it in Adobe Photoshop, and it turns it into a DNG, a digital negative file, and instead of being 45 megabytes, now it’s 150 megabytes, so it’s three times larger than what the original image was. And if this is part of a 3000 frame time lapse, where each of the images you process before you drop it into Premiere to make your movie clip out of you can see how your 60 terabytes of raw images now could easily turn into 200 terabytes of images by the time you’re done. And then do you? Do you trash all of these intermediate images. What happens if you end up with this premier timeline and you make a cool video clip, and then it’s like, wow, I want to change something. Do you want to go back and have to recreate all of that? Or do you want to save all these intermediate steps? And I like to save the intermediate steps. So I could go back and and make a different version at will. So so your memory requirement, storage, memory for these things, could just balloon.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And on that too. I with those challenges in the amount of photos that you take. You can try to review as much as you can, but keep shooting. I’ll combine these two nuggets that you guys were talking about earlier together. It’s it’s lighting and the orbital speed in which you are moving here on Earth. If you’re taking photos, or you know, graduation photos, wedding photos, you know, that magical Golden Hour, as people like to call it, whether you know, just after sun, sunrise or just before sunset, when you know images can tend to shine brightest and the best. And in terms of that time of day. Is there such a thing on the International Space Station in terms of a peak time you’re trying to capture?
Don Pettit
Yeah, there’s the golden five seconds.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Yeah I was going to say, it’s not an hour. It can’t be an hour!
Don Pettit
But rest assured, 90 minutes later, you’ll have another golden five seconds, maybe 10 seconds.
Matt Dominick
That’s that’s so true. It was so awesome. You could, you could get, you know, you don’t get the golden hour at once. Cumulative over the whole day, maybe between sunrises and sunsets. One of the strategies I employed trying to find that ideal lighting case was setting up time lapses so I would be busy during the day doing my my real job.
Don Pettit
Hold on, you had a real job?
Matt Dominick
I don’t think I’ve had a real job my entire life. I’ve been 20 years of doing crazy things. But the you would I would set up the camera. For example, there was this one window I really loved in the Russian segment, looking aft towards the service module. And the in the Russian solar race and service module this brilliant, amazing blue color, and they reflect just as the sun comes up, the light hits them, and it makes this brilliant blue for just a couple frames. And it’s just amazing. And so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out, when is that lighting just right. And instead of just staring out the window for 90 minutes when I’m supposed to be doing my actual job, I would set up a camera to take a picture every, you know, maybe quarter second every half second, and then Don, Don’s got it. Don, Oh, yep, yes! Don has a picture of this.
Don Pettit
I call it “Abalone” because, because these solar panels look like an abalone shell.
Matt Dominick
For those, for those watching at home, don’t got a great picture right now in front of us of these just brilliant blues and how they reflect off the Russian solar arrays. Both Don and I have posted some of those pictures online. But to get that right as the sun rises, it just set up the time lapse, and it’s taken a picture every quarter second, every half second, and then you come back later, and you have the camera set up to make a video. So it takes all the raw images, but it makes a video. And I can go watch a 90 second video and find what part of the orbit, the lighting is perfect, and then set up the camera and the right exposure for the next the next lap, and capture a bunch of brilliant stills.
Joseph Zakrzewski
That was a great one, by the way. And again, if you’re at home or you’re in a safe space, to do so, I hope you continue to follow along and watch and take a look at what Don and Matt have put together on their social channels in nasa.gov as Don pulled up one of his images that he took during one of his missions. But, well, now, I mean, let’s dive into the tools of the trade. We’ve talked about f-stops, we’ve talked about cameras and Z 9s and Z’s and Z’s and A’s and B’s. Let’s go ahead and get to it. Let’s talk gear. What kind of cameras and lenses do you use on station? Do you prefer on station? Do you have, you know, a, 1A and a 1B in terms of favorites, or is it all just on a case by case basis, what you try and pull from in terms of your your holster of gear to pull off of?
Matt Dominick
Man, if you had to pick something fast, I like fast, fast lenses.
Don Pettit
Yeah, fast. That’s right, fast lenses at fast meeting, they have a large optical diameter compared to their focal length, so that they can suck in a lot of light.
Matt Dominick
Right. I like fast lenses, because I can suck in a lot of light. I can do fast shutter speeds. It’s great for night. I think it’s great for inside the space station. The space station lighting is not super bright, and so people are moving, and I like to take candids of people while they’re working. And if you’re going to do that, it’s kind of annoying to have a flash on. So having a fast lens inside the cabin to capture your crew mates working, you can quickly do it, you know, within reason, at a reasonably fast shutter speed without getting a lot of motion blur. So fast lenses are great for inside, they’re great for outside. They’re great. They’re just, if I had to pick one thing, it’s I want a faster lens. I would typically go around the space station find all the fast lenses.
Don Pettit
And and you need to define what do you mean by fast. Pick a number.
Matt Dominick
Aperture, 1.4 Okay, 1.4 that’s a great one that we have.
Don Pettit
1.2
Matt Dominick
Yeah, 1.2 is nice. We don’t have a lot of those, but we have, we do have the 50 millimeter 1.2.
Don Pettit
We’ve got the mid-80s nocto night core, 58 millimeter f/1.2.
Matt Dominick
When you mean, you said mid-80s, you mean 1980s.
Don Pettit
Yeah.
Matt Dominick
Yeah. It’s great. That’s a great it’s a great lens, but that 58 millimeter is another great 1.2. For the windows we have the 24 and 28 millimeter 1.4 work out pretty well. Man, it’s been eight months, but nine months, but I could probably remember the settings typical time lapse at night is like a quarter second.
Don Pettit
Yeah, quarter second. ISO, 6400 f/1.4.
Matt Dominick
I mean, is there another part of the lens you use other than 1.4 that you could go to other f-stops? But not typically, I’ve always got that they locked in at 1.4.
Don Pettit
Yeah, another. They the Nikon 50 millimeter f/1.2 lens, the focus mechanism on it moves really. It doesn’t have a lot of friction associated with it, and it’s real easy to bump it. So you you get it focused in on stars under magnification. And then I would take have a piece of Kapton tape, and I would tape it in that location, because it’s so easy to bump the focus ring inadvertently when you’re moving the camera around to get the composition you want. And just change the focus slightly, and then the stars aren’t pinpoints anymore. And I gotta have stars that are pinpoints, or I’m not happy.
Matt Dominick
It’s a very reasonable request Don. I think that like to give people a sense of what it’s like to set up maybe a night time lapse. You know, it’s after dinner. It’s a nice evening. Crewmates have gone off to sleep. You float into the cupola. It’s, you’re set, you know, it’s the sun is just set on a night pass. This is Radio. We have to, we have to set the picture right, like, it’s kind of like War of the Worlds. The so, you know, you kind of float in the cupola. It’s quiet, other than for just the fans buzzing on the space station. And you’re alone, like orbiting the Earth, just whizzing by. And it’s just you have this beautiful seven windows to yourself onto the world. And so you have and you’re surrounded by maybe four or five Z 9 cameras and an array of lenses to choose from. And you, you know, you pop on like the 24 millimeter or 28 millimeter f/1.4 for that night pass, and you set me a quarter second, 1600 ISO. And then, yeah, that’s about, right? Those are all the settings you need, but you set it up with a shroud, so this big shroud that’s perfectly cut to the window, and it velcros around the window, and then the camera fits through a small slot so that you don’t get any reflections from any electronics.
Don Pettit
It’s cloth. It’s like two layers of really dense black cloth.
Matt Dominick
Gets rid of all your reflections. And, you know, it could I had this amazing image I took, except for I had this little light leak in the bottom right, and nobody sees it but me. But I see this little light leak in the bottom right of this image and it drives me bonkers!
Don Pettit
I see that, those too. This is an example. When you put a lens into a shroud, you have little pull cord to kind of keep light from leaking around and and pulling that little cord and then moving the camera for the final composition. That’s when the focus ring can get bumped. And then you no longer have stars at pinpoints. They look like little pigeons or little comets and, and, and that’s, you know, that’s why I would tape the focus.
Matt Dominick
Absolutely. So you would set up the camera, and you would point it at us, you know, out to the composition you want. And we had pre programmed one of the buttons on the camera to go from regular zoom into a, you know, it would zoom in on the view finder to extreme tight zoom. And, you know, you could move around with the little digital pad. You could move around where it’s pointing, and you would go find a star.
Don Pettit
And then you’d focus.
Matt Dominick
And you focus and make that star. So Don’s talking about the star looks kind of like a little diamond or flat, and you kind of focus until it’s a perfect circle, and you can approach from the left, or you can approach from the right, and you kind of get all set up so you have a perfectly round star. And then that’s the last thing I do before I set off the time lapse. And so it’s not bumped or you tape it down.
Don Pettit
Yeah. And it will sometimes too, if you’re you’re setting up, in order to focus on a star, it has to be dark enough to see the stars. And if you want to start light, like, say, you’re doing a comet, a series of comet pictures, and you want to get the comet right about the time the sun sets, you can’t focus on the star because it’s too bright to see the stars to focus on. So maybe the pass before you would have focused on stars taped the focus ring with this Kapton tape and and then assume that the focus was going to stay for the next pass, and you learn about your lenses, and you learn that, hey, I could tape the focus ring down and it it will be in sharp focus on on the next pass and the next pass or the next pass, unless someone like Matthew came in and messed with it.
Matt Dominick
I’ll write on your Kapton tape “Matt was here.” So you take all these shots and you make some decisions about- there is a setting in the camera called Long Exposure noise reduction, and so that’s an option where you would, it would take the image and then it would close the sensor protector. I think it’s called, it’s not really, it’s not really a shutter anymore.
Don Pettit
I always call it a shutter. If it covers a sensor and it makes a clicking sound like a shutter. I call it a shutter.
Matt Dominick
*Quacking sound* If it walks like a duck. Yeah, like a duck. I guess it’s a shutter. So the it’s the shutter, and then the camera will take an image with the shutter closed. And so that way it can see what kind of sensors sensor noise is there from result of radiation impacts, and right? And so our cameras can pick up a lot of bad pixels due to radiation. So then the camera can do some in camera noise reduction. You can also do that after the fact it although it’s not as good, I don’t think.
Don Pettit
I agree. I agree there’s magic that when it happens in the camera with the same chip and the same electronics, and you, you take the raw files, make them into tiffs, and then do subtraction on a laptop afterwards, and it doesn’t do as good a job.
Matt Dominick
No. And Don’s talking about you take after you do your nighttime lapse, you take down the camera, you cover it up, the lens, but dark, and then you take at the same ISO, right? And you take some dark frame shots, and then you use those to subtract it later.
Don Pettit
Yeah, and I would do dark frames before a time lapse, when the camera’s at whatever temperature happens to be, and then a half hour later, when it’s been operating full time taking pictures, a camera body warms up and the noise level changes. And I would take a series of dark frames after the the sequence, and then, depending on what kind of tricks you want to do, I would take the the first 1/3 of the sequence, and I would use the first dark frame, and then the last third of that sequence, I would use the final dark frame, and then I take the two dark frames and blend them together and use that for the middle third. And that’s if you really want to get nerdy in terms of noise reduction.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And that was one of my questions I had for you guys, is, you kind of talked about, you know, reflections and through the several levels. But I mean what you’re exposed to and how light reacts and responds to what you’re seeing on the International Space Station is a little different than if we were to go outside here on Earth today. So I mean things like radiation and how light reflects or refracts, how much of that played into your planning of what you were trying to shoot, if you were trying to get any one pinpointed item,
Matt Dominick
It’s a, playing all the lighting and the timing together is, is a challenge. I spent weeks on one photograph trying to get that just right, like I ended up making a small video of how I ended up doing it and was able to get all the crew members. But getting all those pieces together is tough. And the specific case was the Dragon on the top of the space station. Another term is zenith. So the Dragon has windows that face forward, station forward, and then we had the Starliner up there briefly that had a window that looked up towards it. And so setting up the camera in there, taking pictures at night up towards dragon. Dragon’s too dark, because you wanted to capture the Milky Way galaxy behind it, and so to have the exposure necessary and the darkness necessary to see that it just, Dragon wasn’t coming into view. And so figured out that the moon was rising on the horizon before the sun, and there’s a brief moment when just the tip of the moon was rising above horizon, and that provided just enough light to illuminate Dragon, but not enough to drown out the Milky Way behind it. And so getting that timing every orbit, there was about a second to two second period where the light was just right. And so setting that camera up on a on a time lapse, so it keeps taking that picture, getting that set up, knowing when the moon is gonna the moon rise, not the sun. The sun’s too bright at night to get all of that and then floating off myself and getting up into the Dragon, and then getting the lighting right inside of Dragon. So I took these little lights in the Dragon, little LED lights, and put them down to 1% like the lowest setting, but that was still too bright, covered it with a washcloth to get it dim, and then put that off of my face and that, because that was so, so dim, and then that allowed a picture of me to be taken in the Dragon looking out into the galaxy, right from the Starliner, looking up. It’s my it’s it took weeks to get that figured out.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And that’s the beauty of the art form, is what you had to take to get to it. And, Wow, that’s incredible.
Matt Dominick
But we got it down to a science such that then one day, I would just rotated all my crewmates through so they could we could have a picture of them in the Dragon looking out, because we knew every orbit. But there was just this weird sequence of events for a week or two where the moon would rise just before the sun. Don’s got his as well. Same kind of concept, Don looking out of the cupola. Oh, that’s absolutely cool.
Don Pettit looks towards Earth from the Cupola on the International Space Station.
Don Pettit
It is. And I did the same trick with a mini mag flashlight and a cloth handkerchief over it to subdue it and it. And it takes many, many tries to get the lighting on your face to match all the lighting that you want for the vehicle and Earth or whatever.
Matt Dominick
Yeah. So this is one of those cases where I was like, This is a story to tell, the story of how this image is made. And so I made a video of how I set it all up, and made a video the camera set up and talked to the camera, and then sent all the big B-roll files down to earth and some great folks here on earth edited together to tell that story in a video we could share.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And leaning right into that too. I mean this video again, or this photo that Don just shared again, it’s very exactly what Matt’s talking about with with the light reflecting on him as Don looks out of the cupola down to earth. One of the other things that I love about not only your still shots, is your long exposures, and that’s something that I would love to talk about with you guys. And again, for those listening, you can go on nasa.gov and go to the expedition site, so you can see a lot of their work. You can see Matt’s long exposures, Don’s long exposures. And with that, you did a lot of time lapses, which we’ve been talking about, of, you know, Dragon on approach, or Dragon backing away, you know, in different, you know, space ops, but behind it, you see just these beautiful streaks of light, whether they’re stars, whether the cities below, whether it’s the Aurora coming up underneath it. Talk to me about some of that art form that goes behind, not just still images and capturing one moment in time, but capturing a vast moment of time that covers, you know, from the stars to the earth to the you know, whether it’s a spacecraft involved, or, I think, in photo we’re looking at right now is the solar arrays in the International Space Station in a certain position. But I would love to learn more about your time lapse and how you guys love to calculate that vision you have for capturing the earth in the space above it, as well as you know the items in the near ground.
A time lapse of Earth from the International Space Station.
Don Pettit
The star trails, or these long exposure images where the orbital motion makes anything that produces light into a streak, they’re one of my favorites. And you could do it primarily at night, and out of every 90 minutes, you only have about 30 minutes of really dark, dark. And so you could do up to a 30 minute exposure. But you don’t just leave the shutter open for 30 minutes, you do a whole series of 15 to 30 second exposures, and then you stack them together in using software to make effectively a 30 minute exposure.
Matt Dominick
Yeah, this looks like, you can see that, if you look really carefully, you can see where the shutter closes briefly and starts again, right?
Don Pettit
That’s the write time to disk. To memory.
Matt Dominick
Right. And so that’s what Don’s talking about the shutter closes, and it writes it to the disk, and then it starts the next image. And you can see it, if you look closely at the images, how it’s composed from multiple images. But it got to the point I could, at some point, and it’s been a while, it’s been eight months, that I could look at the length of the streak and tell you the exposure length, right? So I think these are probably 15 to 20 seconds exposure,
Don Pettit
30 seconds.
Matt Dominick
Just by looking at the length of the streak, I don’t know, the f-stop.
Don Pettit
Yeah. And the phenomenology, the natural phenomenology you could see at one of these pictures, I could talk for almost 30 minutes on just the natural state of what you see in this picture that’s completely independent on whether you think it has an esthetic measure to it, but there’s just so so much earth science that speaks out in one of these pictures.
Matt Dominick
And this looks like just looking at you can see lightning strike right there that happened. It looks like it’s about just that sun’s about to rise. You can see the sun like this is just a couple seconds prior to sunrise. Yeah, right. As it starts to illuminate. The sky with the blues and then the greens and the oranges in the atmosphere, you could, you’ve stared at this so many times. You start to pick up like this as a cloud streak. But these are, you know, clear city light streaks.
Don Pettit
And then the the horizon view of the atmosphere. The scale height is about 120 kilometers, and the atmosphere generally glows kind of this greenish glow. It kind of looks like a slice of key lime pie stuck on the edge of Earth and and the 120 kilometers that’s, that’s about 400,000 feet. That’s entry interface for spacecraft. Right at the edge of that is where spacecraft start to get really hot, and then above this glowing key lime pie, above that, you’ll see some faint red, and that’s called the F region in the atmosphere, and that is centered right around 400 kilometers. So so we on station are at 400 kilometers. We’re flying through this red zone above the green zone. And anyway, the physics behind what you could see in these pictures is just something that I could talk. I could talk for for hours on just what you see in these
Matt Dominick
I think, man, we just need to get more people to space. I look at this picture, and I realize I can decompose like, what, how Don took that picture, because I can see the small artifacts and how the light, you can see the little bit of blue coming up on just one side of the space station there, and it can kind of infer, like, what orbit they’re in, or where they’re at orbital, where he’s looking at on the space station, just having stared at it for eight months. You know, every small detail of that image. We just need to give more people to space to experience this. Don’s got another image coming.
Don Pettit
Yes, another what? And just cool stuff. Here’s the red part, the F region, and that’s due to atomic oxygen emitting around 630 nanometers. And here’s the kind of the yellowish. In this case, it looks more yellowish. That’s the atmosphere that you can see about 120 kilometers. If you look at the arcing of the stars, if you look to your port or starboard side, the stars are going in circles. But if you look in the velocity vector, the stars go in a straight line and and this is all simple geometry of what your orbit is doing. And then, then a single thunderstorm. As a function of time, it goes flash, and it’ll be dark for a bit, and then there’s motion, and it goes flash again, and then dark, and then flash, and little flash, and then a big flash, and then dark and and so you can see a time history of a single of a single thunderstorm. And then you look at the the cities there, there, if they’re yellow orange, like that. It’s a sodium vapor. If they’re bluish green, it’s mercury vapor. And if it looks like all these pastel candy colors, typically over Southeast Asia, they’re all LEDs.
Matt Dominick
There’s, there’s so much information in these little pictures. If you’d understand, like the science and physics and where you’ve been, what’s going on. I feel like that. We need to provide you a list of links that you can put in.
Joseph Zakrzewski
I see Dane taking a lot of notes here, on page here, go here.
Matt Dominick
But like a list of links for the to for the listeners to maybe click on later to understand it or follow along with some of these picture descriptions, because there’s a lot going on here.
Don Pettit
Oh, oh, I got a this one. I call this one “Lightning Bugs.” It’s just, it’s just saturated with with just intense lightning storms, anyway…
A time lapse of thunderstorms on Earth from the International Space Station.
Matt Dominick
So many the lightning storms are impressive.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Well, with that, lightning is a fleeting moment. So here on the long exposures where you see these streaks, and, like you said, lightning bugs that just populate your entire field of view, recently, close to the time of this recording, we’ve seen, you know, and in your conversations that you guys had together on Twitch, about several, you know, events on earth that you try and capture, whether they’re called red sprites or gigantic jets or, you know, natural phenomena that happen on earth that we hear below the clouds cannot see. And would love to dive into how you plan for some of those fleeting moments and those those luminous events that happen above the clouds and above the atmosphere, that when you capture them, it’s like capturing a bolt of lightning in a perfect frame shot, and how you are able to manage and plan for some of those events.
Matt Dominick
Luck. Well, I mean, not entirely luck, but we know where the strongest thunderstorms are, and we just set up cameras and fire 1000s of shots, yes, hoping that one of them captures it. I mean, probably, I probably thought shot 50,000 images just trying to capture sprites, and maybe got three, wow. And then Nichole, like, a week ago. Yeah, whoa, the most insane.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Yeah, that’s the one I’m referencing.
Matt Dominick
That shot from Nicole is just insane. Yeah, the timing, the where it is, it’s it’s just impressive.
Don Pettit
Although you caught a sprite or a giant jet right on the limb of the earth and and I like that, because you could use the length scales that you know in the atmosphere as a ruler, to actually measure, to put, put a link scale on the the giant jet. Anyway.
Matt Dominick
So the one that I was lucky to get on the horizon, you’re talking about, like, Don like, I took this picture. I was like, holy cow, this is amazing.
Don Pettit
Yeah, I was still on earth at that time, you, I hadn’t gotten, we hadn’t…
Matt Dominick
So Don did the analysis and made this really cool infographic showing, you know, this is the height of the sprite based upon the atmosphere. It was 120 kilometers, or something like that. And so from a science perspective, it’s, it’s pretty picture. I’m a little bit biased, but it’s a pretty picture.
Don Pettit
But Nichole’s kicked you.
Matt Dominick
Nichole’s picture is so beautiful because it’s right there in the center of the frame. Yeah, the composition is amazing. You got the CanadArm off to the right, yeah, letting people know, like, this is taken from a spacecraft by a human. Like it just in. The sprite is gorgeous, and it’s right there.
Don Pettit
It is, and you could see the whole structural detail of it from starting off looking more like a blue jet, and then it branches off into spriteness.
Matt Dominick
What’s interesting, I don’t I haven’t followed red sprites a whole lot in the course of my career, and we are we capturing more than we used to?
Don Pettit
I think it has to do with with the development of of high quality digital cameras. And I think, I think these things have been around before human beings were even around. And I know, you know, you know anything about these, these fighter pilot types, and they would, they would be flying in airplanes and say, Hey, I saw this upward directed lightning, and it was kind of pink, and it looked like it went to high altitude. Everybody thought they were crazy. They were they were seeing things. You know, you’d been flying too long, and you were hallucinating, and then, and then people started to get some pictures of them when the digital cameras came out. And these, the these things, transient luminous events, these used to be called Upward directed lightning, where there’s still a lot of unknown in terms of how these shades work, obviously, they do. And the more imagery we could get of these, say, the more we’re going to learn.
Matt Dominick
And there’s a group of folks on earth. You kind of have your storm changers, your lightning chasers, tornado chasers, yeah. So you have a group of folks that are actually chasing these from Earth and take some really incredible pictures of incredible pictures of them from Earth looking up. And there’s a group of people trying to match those earth based images of red sprites with space born ones. Yeah.
Don Pettit
And one idea that was particularly my abilities on orbit was to get nadir views of lightning and or blue jet sprites and giant jets, something that you can’t do from Earth or from airplanes You can’t get above these to get a straight nadir downward view. But from space station, you can you fly right over these, and if you set the cameras up correctly, you could start to image these lightning storms. And every once in a while, you might catch a blue jet, a sprite or a giant jet, and you could spatially see where they form in relationship to the rest of the thunderstorm. Where, if you’re on a sideways view, you might not necessarily be able to see that information and that that’s something that that Nichole Ayers has picked up on and is is continuing to do that.
Joseph Zakrzewski
I have a couple more for you. Guys. I know we’re really getting into this, but we probably need a couple more hours. Guys, you good? We can keep going. Okay, keep rolling. Okay, no, I’m just kidding for us here on Earth with the lessons you’ve learned, whether it’s in your training, whether it’s on, you know, your practices on orbit, and then coming back to Earth for those I mean, we’ve learned about the tech. We’ve learned about the sciences, what to look for, what the setting should be. But if I wanted to create that International Space Station aesthetic and. Give it. Give my photos that Matt Dominic and Don Pettit judge, if you will, what are probably some of the best ways that I could accomplish that in my photography here on Earth?
Don Pettit
Take lots of pictures. Understand your camera.
Matt Dominick
Tell a story. Like the world that don’t stop being curious about the world around you, like, it’s, it’s, I think you, I think you truly become old when you stop asking why, and when you stop being curious. Don. Don’s maybe a couple years older than me, but, but Don is not old. Don’s not old.
Don Pettit
Yeah, tell that to my wife.
Matt Dominick
Don’s not old, like Don is still… Don. If you watch Don walk down the street, Don will stop and look at ants and see how the ant trails move. Don will stop and look at butterflies and try and understand why they’re going this way. Look at bees and look at other things. He’s never stopped being curious about the world around him and try to understand. And if you’re a cool way to capture that is to take the imagery of it, right, and to see that. And so if you just have that mindset, you’re never going to be old, and you’re going to take great pictures.
Don Pettit
Ooh, ooh! Butterflies! Now you say you think the butterflies are these flighty fades, and they they’re they don’t know how to fly very well, because they’re just flighty all around. Well, you I would sit in the backyard watching monarchs, and there were two monarch butterflies and it was like the these butterflies are doing some kind of mating flight. And they are such precision flyers when you see these two butterflies flying in formation, they’re better than than what you could do as a fighter pilot, and for flying in formation, I mean. And so you, you think, you think these flighty butterflies are, the world’s worst flying insect, because they’re just bouncing all around, and they know exactly what they’re doing. And if there’s another butterfly they want to get with, they could fly in an amazing formation pattern.
Matt Dominick
I would like to submit this as evidence for my prior my prior hypothesis. Don has not lost curiosity.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And that’s a beautiful thing to have and continue, whether you’re here on earth or up on the International Space Station. My last question for the two of you before I let you go and again, thank you so much for your time and and sharing this insight, and for us to follow along with what imagery and and videos and stills and time lapses that you’ve been able to produce for us, if, if you were able to go back up on orbit tomorrow and you had the equipment you wanted with you. Is there a bucket list of photos or an item or an event that you hope to capture? We’ve talked about comets. We’ve talked about, you know, electric discharges and sprites and major events. We’ve talked about, you know, certain passes over certain cities. But if there was something that you really got to hone in on and knew it was coming, or maybe just by accidental surprise. Is there a bucket list of of items that you hope to photographer photographize? Is that a word?
Matt Dominick
No.
Joseph Zakrzewski
It is not? All right. Take pictures of again.
Matt Dominick
I gotta let Don close this one out. So I’ll go first. I think, I don’t know the exact answer. It would require some research and preparation, but I think I want to look at some of the new tech out there with more dynamic range. I think, look at some of the more advanced digital cinema cameras that might have more dynamic range in there. I think I’d want to do more video instead of individual frames. I’d be concerned about bandwidth. So I want more data to come down. But we were, we were pushing the limits of the bandwidth, of of the data link down. So you might have to take hard drives up there, but I think more dynamic range. The thing that was really hard to capture, I never truly did, was the transition between day to night and night to day, the light and the colors on the space station are so insane during the transition, and that’s just really, really hard to capture. Don and I talked about doing a full 90 minute time lapse, but the camera setup to do so just doesn’t work well. And then the other thing I would do is more video of the setups, and more video of telling the stories and more B roll to capture it.
Don Pettit
The state of the lenses right now… I flew, I was able to talk some folks here at NASA into funding a couple special lenses for me, which actually showed up before I arrived and Matthew got a hold of the lenses, but which is exactly how they should be used, 14 millimeter f/1.4 leads, so, so before that, the 24 millimeter was the one. Lightest angle lens that was really fast glass. And now we’ve got the 14 millimeter. We’ve got a 15 millimeter Arri Zeiss Cinema Lens that we could adapt to to the Z 9 camera. And that’s a T1.8 and cinema lenses, they don’t go by f-stop, they go by t-stop. And that’s another podcast to explain that. But we’ve got one of each of those lenses, and I’d like to have at least two more of those lenses so that you could put, you could set up multiple cameras all with the same lens, and then you could do, do what Matthew was talking about, which is time lapse, a full pass going through day and night transition. And you could sync multiple cameras together and have the cameras running at different settings, so that one would be more set up for the day, and one would be set up by the night, but they’d be synced together and and then you could assemble the images into a high dynamic range image after the fact. So that’s one series of images that if we could go back, I’d do that. I’d like to fly a laptop computer that could actually play an 8k video, so that we could see what we’re doing and could quickly go through the images in a review manner. And then I want to re-fly this sidereal tracker that has been modified to track at orbital rates, not earth rotation rates, and that allows you to take up to about a 30 second exposure where the stars will be points and everything else will be blurry.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Well, I’m excited to see all of those from both of you. Thank you guys so much for joining us on Houston. We have a podcast. I can’t wait to dive in. I’ve already taken 1001 notes, as has our team. Our team to to take better pictures here on Earth. Matthew Dominic, Don Pettit, thank you.
Matt Dominick
Thank you.
Don Pettit
Yeah, this is fun. I mean, being able to get Matthew and I in the same room and talk about imagery, I mean, fun is going to happen.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Thanks for sticking around. I hope you learned something new today.
You can check out the latest from around the agency nasa.gov and you can find out more about our astronaut corps at nasa.gov/astronauts. If you want to know more about Matt and Don and their paths to becoming astronauts, you can check out episodes 323 for Matt Dominick and 350 for Don Pettit. Those in all of our episodes can be found at nasa.gov/podcasts.
On social media we are on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, X, and Instagram. If you have any questions for us or suggestions for future episodes, email us at nasa-houstonpodcast@mail.nasa.gov.
This interview was recorded on July 9, 2025.
Our producer is Dane Turner. Audio engineers are Will Flato and Daniel Tohill, and our social media is managed by Reagan Scharfetter. Houston We Have a Podcast was created and is supervised by Gary Jordan. Special thanks to Courtney Beasley, Chelsey Ballarte and Reagan Scharfetter for helping us plan and set up these interviews. And of course, thanks again to Don Pettit and Matt Dominick for taking the time to come on the show.
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