Lo Stivale d'Italia

My Italian is a little rusty, so I hope I got the title right. Either way, here's what I was referring to:

Isn't that gorgeous? It's Italy, of course, seen on August 18, 2012, at night by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The ISS was well to the southeast, probably over Libya or Egypt in Africa, when the astronaut took this shot facing northwest. I poked around a bit, and the ISS was in this position twice on that date. Once was during the day, and the other around local midnight, so that fits.

It's pretty neat to see Italy from space; I've posted an image like this before (though the ISS was much more overhead for that one). In this one you can see the arc of green airglow caused by oxygen atoms about 100 kilometers up giving up energy after getting whacked by ultraviolet light from the Sun. To the left and along the top you can see some of the ISS structures, too.

I'll note that on Thursday, August 23, NASA announced that the private company SpaceX had been approved for a dozen cargo flights to and from ISS; this comes after their successful demo mission in May. The first of these flights is scheduled for October 2012. Not only that, but the aerospace company XCOR will be opening a new facility in Florida, near NASA's Kennedy Space Center. XCOR is building a reusable suborbital spaceplane called Lynx, and expects to phase into orbital work eventually.

It's exciting to see private industry getting involved! And it shows that, when it comes to space travel, America is still looking up.

Image credit: NASA. Tip o' the spacesuit visor to Fragile Oasis.

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- Buonanotte, Italia
- The softly glowing night sky
- Turns out, it *is* a river in Egypt
- Debating space