Sunset from space

Bad Astronomy
By Phil Plait
Jun 14, 2010 4:00 PMNov 20, 2019 2:28 AM

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What does a sunset look like when you're racing through space at 8000 meters per second? This:

Oh, I could go on and on about the curvature of the Earth, the layers of the atmosphere, the distribution of colors, how the aerosol layer is thin and glows after sunset, and what it must be like to go through 16 sunrises and sunsets every day. But you can get all that information from the NASA website. And really, the enduring nature of this picture is not what it shows, but that it was taken by a human being in space.

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